How To Bootstrap A SaaS Company From $0 to $200M | ProfitWell Founder Patrick Campbell

Sam Parr

Alright we are live what's going on man how are you

Patrick Campbell

what's going on gentlemen

Sam Parr

so we have patrick campbell what the company was profitwell

Patrick Campbell

yeah so starting with profitwell

Sam Parr

it was something else for first right

Patrick Campbell

Yeah, we called it **Price Intelligently**. So we did a little piece of pricing software, morphed into pricing software and service - a lot of service actually - and then started building this metrics tool and all that kind of fun stuff. And then recently sold to Paddle, which is a payments infrastructure product, if that makes sense.

Sam Parr

The headline price was $200,000,000, and you bootstrapped the company. I think in a tweet you said you owned... I don't know if it was you and your co-founder or company owned, but you guys owned almost all of it, right?

Patrick Campbell

Yeah, we were bootstrapped, so we owned 100% of it. But we were pretty generous. I think I tweeted about the fact that we were generous in giving out equity. So it wasn't like I had 100%. I think the headline number is we had 13 millionaires. We had about 30 to 35 people who made $6K or more. Then, I think there were around 120 people in total—current employees and those who had worked at the company previously—who received some sort of consideration out of the deal. So, can I share this? It was over 200. Technically, we're not public. I don't know, it's so weird about these numbers. It's like, what are you public with and what are you not? I have a board and a boss now, so I have to be a little careful. Not that careful, but a little careful about all the things I say.

Shaan Puri

You do seem like you're cultivating that trillionaire energy that we like to see. So, I gotta say, I'm getting the vibe... I'm getting that extreme satisfaction and relief vibe that comes when you sell a company.

Sam Parr

well sean ask him where he moved

Patrick Campbell

knew how tightly wound I am so yeah that's interesting

Sam Parr

ask him where he just moved to go ahead tell him

Shaan Puri

where where did you just move to

Patrick Campbell

I moved to Puerto Rico for all the obvious reasons. Just to put it out there, just to be very clear... very obvious reasons why I moved here. It's 80 [degrees] and I'm not a huge fan of the heat, but I am basically recording with a 6K camera right now. That's that **trillionaire energy** where it's like, "Where do you put the money?" I don't like cars, so I got a really cool, like, dope setup basically.

Shaan Puri

I mean that bookshelf needs a little upgrade too if I'm not if I must be honest here I feel like you know

Patrick Campbell

This was literally like IKEA. I don't have anything behind me, like, "Let's throw some books up and kind of go from there." So, we'll get there. We'll get there.

Sam Parr

So, what exactly did you guys do? Well, I believe we used you, but I think we got you for free. I was like, "How did these guys make money? What exactly did you guys do?"

Patrick Campbell

Yeah, so the headline kind of positioning is: we basically exist to run and grow subscription businesses automatically. The "automatically" aspect was the thing that really worked well for us. What I mean by that is, in the perfect vision world, you should be able to plug in ProfitWell to any subscription business—into Stripe, Chargebee, Zuora, or whatever you're using for your billing. Then, automatically, you get all of your metrics for free, which is probably what you're referencing. We also reduce your churn and cancellations automatically, optimize your pricing automatically, and now with the whole Paddle deal, we take care of your taxes automatically, chargebacks, and all that kind of fun stuff. So, yeah, I think the big thing for us was when we were this pricing service, we wanted to get to something that was more pure software. We were helping a company with their pricing that was about to IPO, and we actually discovered they were calculating MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) and churn completely wrong, which was really fascinating. We kind of put those two insights together and then started producing this metrics product. So, you get all of your financial reporting if you're a subscription or SaaS company. Then, there were like 30 competitors, and it was like all overnight. The space where we thought we were going to be billionaires for metrics suddenly became crowded. It was like, "Oh my God, everyone and their mother is building a Stripe integration." So, we did some homework, we did some research, all that kind of fun stuff, and basically discovered that either this is a terrible business and we should stop doing it because no one is really great at monetizing metrics, or we should take the free route, which is what we did. I think that's probably when we should have raised money—in hindsight. But long story short, that's what grew, and we had, at the end—well, it's still going—but we had 30,000 companies using ProfitWell basically when we sold, and that number is just kind of going up every single day, which is great.

Shaan Puri

And when you reached out to us, you were like, "Hey, I think you do listen to the pod." Is that kind of why you reached out?

Patrick Campbell

of course yeah absolutely I'm glad to hang out with the 12 year olds from a recent episode I learned

Shaan Puri

Yeah, you said something which kind of tipped me off. You were like, "I grew up in Wisconsin doing hoodrat shit." Hat tip to Sam. I was like, "Oh, okay, he knows." There you go, inside jokes. He knows about how sometimes you just want to do hoodrat shit.

Patrick Campbell

Of course, that's why we're getting a ranch built in Utah right now. Everything's going to be great. Like, that's the hoodrat world there.

Shaan Puri

are you are you really you're building a ranch in utah

Patrick Campbell

Yeah, that's the goal. So, I grew up in Wisconsin, right? I grew up literally milking cows as a kid and, you know, kind of having the same par lifestyle. My dad has no idea what I do. He is just confused. He thinks I'm being a tax evader moving to Puerto Rico, like all that kind of fun stuff. You are blue collar.

Shaan Puri

sam he's like you just more rich

Patrick Campbell

yeah yeah

Shaan Puri

what did

Sam Parr

you say sean

Patrick Campbell

that's funny

Shaan Puri

I say yeah yeah I say he's like you just more rich

Sam Parr

yeah it looks like it that's what it seems like

Patrick Campbell

I do what I can. I think the difference is that Sam's living a little differently. I'm like all in, just still nose to the grindstone. But yeah, I grew up in Wisconsin, and then after school, I moved to D.C. I worked in U.S. intelligence and then worked in tech in Boston. That's kind of when I got into the business space, basically.

Shaan Puri

But what I was going to say is you reached out intelligently. We get a bunch of people who are like, "Hey, I would love to come on and tell my story." It's like, yeah, I'm sure you would. Who wouldn't want to come on and tell their story? I also like to get, you know, free fame. But the thing you did was you sent us like, I don't know, 6 or 7 bullet points. You were like, "Here's some stuff I can talk about." Then you sent us, I would say, like 5 or 6 really interesting things. So I kind of want to hop around on those. Let's do it! Sam, did you have a favorite one that you liked from these?

Sam Parr

okay well let's so do you have it in front of you it's hidden industries I got it

Shaan Puri

in front of me

Sam Parr

so hidden yeah that's the

Shaan Puri

Juicy one! That's the juicy one. So basically, you said, "I think we have the largest subscription financial database in the world," right? You guys have 100% of $30,000,000,000 of annual recurring revenue flowing through your system, which is just a bunch of data that will tell you. I bet you there are some things that are like, "No way they make that much," right? There are some surprising niches that make a lot of money, and then there are maybe some trends or benchmarks. So, take it where you want it, but I think that's one that's going to be super interesting. I know I want to know the answer, so I know people listening will too.

Patrick Campbell

Yeah, totally. So, there are a couple of things. One, just to give an example, we always study the data in aggregate. That's what helps train our algorithms for churn reduction and all that kind of fun stuff. But then, the other really interesting thing is that we publish a lot of content on this. For a lot of SaaS companies, it's like, "Oh, what should our churn be? What should this look like?" So, we publish a lot of that. The other thing that got really interesting was that we would basically be kind of like a hidden helper for deal flow for a lot of VCs. We would never reveal someone's particular numbers, of course not. But what was really fascinating is when the Jungle Scout and Amazon play was happening, we would all of a sudden have all of these apps just break our QA scripts. Because every time someone was growing too fast, we would go, "Oh, something must be broken with the metrics."

Shaan Puri

right

Patrick Campbell

So, that's a little bit of context. There are about 3 or 4 really fascinating industries, especially going into a recession, that I think are great for people who want to fast-move into them. One of these industries, which is kind of crazy to talk about, is **quilting and crafts**. Quilting and crafts subscription companies are growing at an insane rate. What's fascinating is the quilting space. If you didn't know, quilting is about a **$4.5 billion** per year industry. The average quilter spends about **$8,000 to $9,000** per year on quilting supplies. Most of that comes not just online, but through quilt shops. So, there's a really interesting local play that we've seen some of these companies use, along with some of the more popular apps.

Sam Parr

quilting just means like making a blanket that has like designs on it right

Patrick Campbell

For the most part, now as a mom—a Midwest mom who does hardcore quilting—there's a lot of other stuff. Like, our house? We didn't have pictures up; we had quilts that were hung.

Sam Parr

right

Patrick Campbell

Of like different designs and all kinds of stuff. But yeah, every major milestone in my life, I got a quilt. I have 6 quilts in Puerto Rico that are useless to me, just given how warm it is here. Mom, what's...

Shaan Puri

There's... I see. I went to someone else's house, and they had a painting on the wall. It's like, "No, no, no, you don't need that. Just put a blanket on the wall."

Patrick Campbell

Quilts... yeah, yeah, yeah. It's great sound deadening; it's really good sound deadening. But yeah, it's really interesting because that market has gone wild. Even knitting and crafts, that type of stuff. What's really interesting about it is, especially in the subscription space, there are a lot of these built-in type projects that these companies have started taking advantage of. So there's this thing called "Block of the Month Club" that has been around since quilters have existed. You create a block of a quilt every single month, basically, and it's like a community type thing. So there's something there. Quilt retreats are a huge thing! I didn't know about that. All of these mostly middle-aged or older women come together, hanging out, staying up all night talking and, you know, quilting. So that's one space. The craft space, knitting, all that kind of stuff is really interesting. Another one that's interesting is basically old people.

Shaan Puri

This space, before you move on... before Sam, do you know stuff about quilting? I feel like you randomly have knowledge about this stuff.

Sam Parr

No, I don't, but I'm looking at... I just googled "block of the month club." So that's like a genre of clubs; that's not the name of a specific club, right? I'm just looking up what these are and I'm looking at the businesses. It wouldn't shock me if some of these are doing 9 figures, so $100,000,000+ in subscription revenue based off just some of their traffic. Like, there's Craftsy and there's AnniesKitClubs.com. Do you know anything about these?

Shaan Puri

yeah

Sam Parr

yeah yeah

Patrick Campbell

yeah so there's there's there are definitely 9 figure companies in the space I'll put it that way

Sam Parr

And then, nine figures a year—so $100,000,000+ in subscription revenue for sale. They basically, like, I don't know what differentiates all of them. I'm just clicking on the ads, but they just sell. Like, they send you a block. You know what a block is, Sean?

Shaan Puri

like it's just one square patch of the quilt

Sam Parr

a a square patch and during the holiday

Patrick Campbell

it's gonna be my dreams come true right now just this whole like learning you guys right now and that

Sam Parr

People think that I am Midwestern. I grew up in an urban environment, in the city. So we weren't exactly quilting, but basically what they do is send you a patch, like a block, a 6-inch by 6-inch block. It looks like it's got pumpkins and a snowman on it, and that's like the holiday version of a...

Shaan Puri

what do you do with that you stitch that into the other blocks that you've been getting

Patrick Campbell

Yeah, so basically, here's how a quilt gets made. I can't believe I'm about to explain this. A quilt is made by these blocks. Now, sometimes it's just designs, and sometimes it has stuff on it, like snowmen and things like that. So, you create these blocks and build a top. Let's say you want a king-size bed; it's just the top, so it's just one layer of fabric. What you do is take it to a quilt shop. The quilt shop is going to charge you per inch to put a back and then a batting, which is like the stuff that makes it kind of a blanket. Then, they put a design in there as they layer those pieces together, and then you have a quilt. Some hardcore moms, like my mom, have their own quilting machine. It's like an 8-foot machine to make all of these quilts. So, yeah, this is the thing.

Shaan Puri

your mom's a bad guy

Patrick Campbell

99% of them are on Facebook. They're all really targetable, which is fascinating. The YouTube content that's come out of the quilt community is pretty wild as well. There's this one in Missouri; I can't remember exactly, but it was like this town that was basically on its last legs. This woman, her son started doing YouTube videos where she would just explain how to do quilting stuff. It basically revitalized the town because everyone comes on buses to visit the town and go to the quilt shop and all that kind of fun stuff. The quilt shows and craft shows are pretty fascinating. This is all my childhood coming out because I got dragged to used bookstores and quilt shops. The quilt shows are wild! They'll just be famous quilters on stage with a camera doing quilt stuff, which is just kind of a fascinating world. There's a lot of money in it. That's like kind of old school, meaning there are a couple of really big players that sell everything, and there are all these new school folks coming in and kind of lopping off different segments.

Shaan Puri

what's your new school company that I I would look at

Patrick Campbell

so the one I was describing

Sam Parr

These moms, while you're looking that up, these quilters are not using Instagram a lot. It looks like I'm looking up quilting on Instagram.

Shaan Puri

facebook group's real heavy

Sam Parr

there's not a ton of pages on instagram that are doing quilting but sounds

Shaan Puri

like an opportunity by the way to like build big quilting pages on instagram

Sam Parr

They are Facebook groups. The Facebook group I've seen, I saw a while ago while researching. While I'm here, I'm looking at tons of highly engaged quilting Facebook groups.

Patrick Campbell

Well, it's also interesting. Like, you'll even see in Boston, there are these little meetups. The younger community is kind of going through knitting into quilting because it's like, "Oh, you get to build something." The designs are a lot more modern, all that kind of fun stuff. But yeah, it's an interesting world. The Missouri Star Quilt Company is the one that I was referencing—the YouTube kind of world.

Sam Parr

how big is that

Patrick Campbell

I don't know their revenue individually I don't think they have a subscription

Sam Parr

sean have you heard of hallmark you know hallmark cards

Shaan Puri

of course so my neighbor used to own like 50 hallmark stores

Sam Parr

really I was

Shaan Puri

like how is this how are these people so rich and they're like oh now they own like a 100 hallmarks

Sam Parr

So, Hallmark is an interesting company related to this. Everything I'm saying is off the top of my memory, so I may be wrong, but Hallmark is a privately owned business. It's owned by a family, and I think it's one of the largest privately owned companies in America. They do **$5 billion** a year in revenue. I think they make money in two ways. They have these stores that are franchises, and they just sell cards. So, Hallmark just sells cards. The other thing that's kind of weird is they own Hallmark Media, which is a Hallmark TV station channel. Yeah, yeah, where they make, like, it's a joke. It's like a genre of Hallmark movies, which are like sappy movies that moms like. But I wouldn't be surprised if they're just, you know, behind the scenes in the quilting game, just calling the shots. You know what I mean? That's the...

Shaan Puri

the deep in the underground quilt game yeah

Sam Parr

big quilt yeah

Shaan Puri

There's only one thing I fear. It's Big Quilt. It's after us. In fact, I want to stop laughing about this.

Patrick Campbell

so it's those companies man they're huge some of the big originals they're huge

Shaan Puri

This hobby, I think, has legs for a couple of reasons. One is that it has a bunch of factors that individually are strong characteristics of potentially good businesses. But when you stack them, it becomes even more valuable. So, it's like this is a stacking of trends. You have the trend of DIY and crafts at home, right? Then you have the trend of "oddly satisfying," which you've seen in these videos of people cutting sand or ASMR stuff like this. There’s a therapeutic benefit to doing these things—tactile activities like these repetitive, tedious tasks of making clean, straight lines with your hands. Then you add on community. It's like, "Oh yeah, people get together and they do this together." Okay, so now this is an excuse. It's like guys getting together to play poker or something like that. It's like, "Yeah, we don't all really want to be the best poker players, but it's just an excuse to sit around and chat." So, you start stacking these on top of each other. Then there's nostalgia because people are making quilts out of their kids' clothes and stuff like that. They think, "What do I do with these old shirts?" It becomes a memory and an heirloom. I have a blanket that my grandma made before she passed away, and that means something to our family because she made it. It's a memory of her. So, you stack all these things on top of each other, and now you have this sort of "Long Island iced tea" of a business where you’ve stacked all these different elements into one cocktail. It's just a strong concept.

Sam Parr

Additionally, I think, Pat, maybe you could kind of tell me if this is true or not. From my experience, most people in Silicon Valley and young people are like, "We're gonna make this app or this widget for millennials or Gen Z." In reality, every business that I know of personally, that are the majority of my friends who own businesses that sell stuff to women in middle America between the ages of 30 and 60, hands down has the highest loyalty and engagement and the lowest amount of churn. Is that accurate? I'm talking about a group of consumers.

Patrick Campbell

Yeah, so normally, if you're selling to older audiences from a consumer perspective, they retain at a higher rate. This is mainly because of the implications you're already alluding to. They're less finicky; they can be harder to convert sometimes because of that loyalty. But once they're in, they've made a decision, and they're sticking it out for quite some time. This is kind of like a lesson: I can tell you that anytime there is a more premium product or a more niche audience, you just have better churn—every single time. For example, ButcherBox started with the whole paleo crowd, which is a very niche market. It was very premium in terms of price, and it worked out really well. Whoop started very high; they were like, "We're athletes," and then all these people who wanted to be athletes too signed up, and they were charging $30 a month. That's always what I recommend: if you're starting something, especially if you're bootstrapping, start high and then come down. It's a lot easier than starting really cheap and then going back up, unless you're running a freemium model, which is a very different model to run.

Sam Parr

sean have you ever been doing have you been doing applebee's lately

Shaan Puri

hell yeah chili's and applebee's baby

Sam Parr

have you really been doing applebee's

Patrick Campbell

yes I have

Sam Parr

That's hilarious! So, do you know how their whole shtick is? Even though it's a chain, they put the neighborhood baseball team on the wall, which, who knows if they're actually from that neighborhood? You know, whenever you go there, they make it feel like that. Well, I had a friend that worked in the advertising part of Applebee's, and one time we had to go there and order everything on the menu, drink, and eat it all. It was horrible! I was like, "Tony, this food is quite bad. This is horrible! I don't like it. I don't think you're going to be able to build this up and make it cool." You know, you're telling me about a nuclear green limeade, and I was like, "Dude, this is horrible! I don't want to drink this. This is awful!" Or like one time I thought, "Why does the cheese...?"

Shaan Puri

taste like beans and the beans taste like cheese what's going on well they they

Sam Parr

sent over something I'm like I don't know what this is and so we dipped it in there and it was icing

Shaan Puri

like

Sam Parr

It was like a side of icing, and I was like, "Dude, this is horrible. Why do people like this?" He's like, "Well, it's mostly middle America, and I believe that they call their ideal customer a 'Jim Bob,' which is someone who is in their fifties, sixties, and seventies and has a little bit of money. But once they continue going there, it feels like it's the last hoorah for the neighborhood. They're supporting their neighborhood and are willing to put up with the crappy food because it somehow feels like their way of life is under attack. This is like the last thing that represents their neighborhood, even though it's some huge national staple."

Shaan Puri

Is changing so much, and this is all... this is the one staple that, like, you walk in and it feels exactly the same as it did when you were 14. Right? What?

Sam Parr

what what what were you gonna say

Shaan Puri

I literally wrote this last night. So, I'm reading a Slack message from 12:35 AM, right after midnight. I just slacked this to myself. I wrote, "If you're selling a cool thing to a cool person, you're playing the game wrong. That is hard mode." This is all about how you meet most people in D2C (direct-to-consumer). Most people in Silicon Valley are in their twenties, they're cool and new to the world, and they're selling to cool and new people in LA, New York, and San Francisco. They're like, "Yeah, of course! I'm gonna create this new cool thing and sell it to new cool people." What you want to do is sell simple things to simple people. I had a buddy tell me this with a project I was working on. He asked, "Okay, so what's your main sales channel?" I said, "Oh, Facebook ads." He replied, "Okay, so that means your customer at scale is an overweight, overworked mom in Texas." He looked at my website and said, "I don't see anything that appeals to her. It doesn't have to look like her; at least it should look like how she wants to look." Basically, he said, "If you can't sell to an overweight, overworked mom in Texas, you can't scale." I was like, "What the hell? Okay, okay."

Sam Parr

you don't even know any overweight overworked moms in texas do you

Shaan Puri

Well, I used to live in Houston, and that turned out to be valuable. It's just like you were saying: my mom used to drag me, probably kicking and screaming, to these quilting shows. Now that I'm an entrepreneur, I'm like, "Oh, quilting niche? Tell me more!" It's like we flip. The thing we used to resist, now we want to go for. Growing up in Texas, I just thought everything cool was in New York, San Francisco, and LA. I wanted to go there. Now that I'm here, I'm like, "Dude, I don't want to sell to these fickle millennials who are trying to do berry detoxes. I want to sell something to a mom in Texas because if I could do that, that's a license to print money." If you look at the best-selling car that lasts, I don't know, 30 years, it's the Ford F-150. It's a pickup truck that sells for $36,000. You go around San Francisco, and you won't see one. You would think the best-selling car in America is the Tesla Model X, but that's just not the case because you're in a bubble. I think of the "Jim Bob," you know, the overweight mom in Texas. The other one is the enterprise sales one, like selling to Bob, the mid-level manager or the senior manager who's got a little bit of a belly and is losing his hair. That's who you're selling to. You gotta nail that sale because if you can, you could build a very, very big business. I mean that in the most loving way possible, which is basically just saying to most entrepreneurs and young people: get out of your bubble.

Patrick Campbell

But you end up not chasing fads. There are a lot of fads, like businesses built on fads, right? And those are great businesses. We hear about them all the time. The guy who... what was it? The teeth... I can't remember. The hillbilly teeth, remember? This was at gas stations. Apparently, it was a $20,000,000 business, right? Like the Snuggie, a huge fad, you know? Hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. But something like quilting has been around forever. It's not sexy, right? But the targeting gets really interesting. And like some of the other things, right? You guys talk about this a lot where it's like service businesses, you know? Lawn care, HVAC, all these other things end up being stuff that sticks around for a long time. And there are businesses that you don't really hear of, and there's a lot of opportunity in terms of roll-up or flipping the model that was basically being used by the folks that are the incumbents. So, what are some...?

Sam Parr

of these other

Shaan Puri

Or if you're going to innovate, innovate on just one thing. It's like, "Oh, quilting! People love it, but there's not a lot of Instagram theme pages and communities on Instagram." Okay, that's like, I can do one new thing on top of nine old things that are still going to be the same. And that's like a new thing, right? Sam did the news, but he did it through email instead of through printed papers. Instead of changing everything else, everything else could stay the same because the human needs stayed the same. Oh yeah, sorry, we went on a long tangent about quilting, but I'm...

Patrick Campbell

talking about quilting baby it's great

Patrick Campbell

yeah

Shaan Puri

what what else you got what are some other kinda niches that you like

Patrick Campbell

Three other spaces I'm happy to go deeper into are trades, roll-ups, plumbing companies, HVAC companies, and electrician companies. There's a lot of that stuff happening. It's not like machine shops or those types of things where it's just hard to innovate. It's skilled enough that there's a niche and there's like a moat, but it's not skilled enough that you can't roll it up. A lot of these guys and gals are looking for basically a way to retire. It's kind of like accountant shops; they don't get more than 1x max in terms of their business. Basically, these are things to sell to the kids of old people. That's the best way to put it.

Sam Parr

What does that mean? I don't know. Yeah, I saw you wrote that "products that prey on baby boomer kid guilt."

Patrick Campbell

Yeah, yeah. So, a really good example—it's not a huge company because it's a one-man shop out of Boston—is Nanograms. It's basically a service where you can email or post something on Instagram, and then it automatically sends a postcard to your nana or to whomever you want to send it to. There are some really interesting things happening here. You have a group with high disposable income and a low amount of time that wants to be spent necessarily with their parents or grandparents, depending on the personality. Basically, the trend that's happening is that there's a huge portion of the population that is aging. You're seeing the multiples on things like old folks' homes or hospice care actually increasing pretty substantially, which is kind of crazy. There have got to be more technology plays. I don't have a giant technology play there, but I've seen a number of people start to build on that particular trend. The last one, which I think is really interesting, is death. That sounds terrible, but I find death interesting. No, I'm not that scared of it. There are four or maybe five companies that basically own everything in the literal last mile of your life: coffins, funeral service homes, everything that's being sold in the funeral service homes, even how the memories and that last part looks. There are some businesses that have tried, but because of the five people kind of owning everything, they are multi-billion dollar companies.

Sam Parr

what's the biggest ones

Patrick Campbell

I have essentially been... I don't have the names in front of me, but I know someone tried five years ago. A guy named Dave Balter in Boston basically tried to start a memory company. The idea was that you would load up memories, and then all of a sudden, you would get that information back via Alexa. So you could be like, "Oh, Alexa, tell me about my grandpa," or something like that, and what happened six years ago with him in an adventure. He was the one telling me that he would go visit these companies, saying, "Hey, maybe I could sell to these companies," and they were all in buttoned-up suits, you know, all that kind of fun stuff. So that's a space that I think, given the aging population, there's probably something there that makes sense as well. Gotcha.

Shaan Puri

Let's switch gears real quick. You had said something else, which was, "Let's do some quick hits." Okay, so let's try to do these. Give me the kind of quick jab on these. You said, "I used NSA learnings to do competitive intelligence." What the hell are you talking about?

Patrick Campbell

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, my first job out of school, I worked at the NSA. I was an intel analyst. The best way to put it is that it was like Jack Ryan's desk job. None of the cool stuff. I did have weapons and defensive driving training, which is kind of cool. The defensive driving training is so much more useful than the weapons training in my real life. But what's really interesting about it is that it was basically the best career start in first principles thinking and thinking about a target. I had a competitive intel program at ProfitWell. It was just me running it, where every quarter I had stats. It's kind of like what you guys have talked about before, but a little bit deeper. So, what I did is I had shadow lists of each competitor, even our partners' customers. I would send shadow NPS surveys, you know, product research surveys, these types of things. The thing that people miss on competitive intel is that it has to be done over time. This is something that they teach you when you're going after a target on the inside, which is that I need to understand not just a...

Patrick Campbell

I need to understand like multiple points in order to kinda create a profile basically and how does the channel create a profile basically how did you get that nps stuff no

Sam Parr

he say he sent a fake nps I straight up

Patrick Campbell

sent surveys

Sam Parr

to their customers

Shaan Puri

sent surveys to their customers so walk me through

Patrick Campbell

that

Sam Parr

walk me through all your research methodologies the this is crazy fascinating

Patrick Campbell

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, there are two main sources of information: **moles** and **mass data**. Moles are like qualitative sources, almost like customer development or product conversations. These are former employees and customers I know who are friendly to me. They're not going to switch because of whatever, but I can talk to them.

Shaan Puri

Okay, let's pause at former employees. You go, you find, "Okay, this person used to work here." What happens? What is the... what is the guy?

Sam Parr

do this all the time

Shaan Puri

present this but yeah me and sam

Patrick Campbell

have talked

Shaan Puri

about this on the pod once but

Patrick Campbell

Totally. So, I frame it like this: you meet him at a conference. Oh, it looked like on Twitter that didn't end well. They weren't like, "After four long, wonderful years at so-and-so, I've now moved on." It was more like, "I'm now over here." Right? They took out the competitor's name. That's someone I want to, for lack of a better phrase, target and have a conversation with. I want to be like, "Hey man, how's everything going?" That type of thing. And again, you're not going to get a vast amount of information, but it's about collecting different points. I've talked to an investor who's thinking of investing in the company. I've also talked to some customers who are officially churning from the product. All of a sudden, I can start putting this together. But the more fascinating stuff—that's color, right? That kind of guides your analysis. Because you, as an analyst, what you're trying to do is predict what's going to happen or, based on some sort of stimulus, what they're going to do. So, if all of a sudden something comes in, or there's a feature that's launched, or some sort of messaging or marketing thing that happens, what are they going to do? That's going to help you respond to whatever they're going to do and prepare for it. That was really interesting because you almost get a feel from those types of people. Like, "Oh, it turns out there's an exodus; a lot of people are leaving. That's great! Let's step on the gas here." But the real kind of secret sauce is what Sam started asking about, which was: there are many lists of customers that you can find if they have some sort of a snippet, obviously built with Clearbit and all those types of things. That's one. Everyone likes to talk about their customers, right? So they have case studies—that's two. Everyone likes to put the logos on their website—that's three. So, you're looking at social, you're looking at BuiltWith, you're looking at all these logos. Then I'm like, "Well, who's the main customer?" I can go find all those email addresses. You're not looking for, "Oh my god, I have 10,000 people," because most of these people don't have 10,000 customers. What you're looking for is enough that then I'm going to start sending out, on a three-month basis, a survey. Or every other month, I'm going to send an NPS survey, and then I'm going to send...

Shaan Puri

So, what domain do you send the survey from? Like, the company name plus feedback, like feedback.com or something? Or what?

Patrick Campbell

There's a couple... I don't want to go too deep, but like, probably like my reputation's already fried on this. So, go ahead.

Sam Parr

Let's say you're trying to create a HubSpot competitor and you want to get HubSpot's MPS information. You send an email that looks like "hubspotfeedback.com" or "gethubspotfeedback.com" or something like that.

Patrick Campbell

I wouldn't go that far because if someone finds that out, it looks really bad, right? But what I would do—and I'm sure people are going to think everything I'm saying is really bad—but whatever, right? So, what I would do is more like marketingsoftwareresearch.com or something to that effect. The way that I position it is, "Hey, so-and-so, you've been identified as a user of HubSpot. I would love 30 seconds of your time to understand what you love and what you don't love." That 30 to 60 seconds is really important. We've sent our pricing software through surveys; we've sent probably 10 million surveys at this point. If you're not compensating someone on an individual basis, the raffle thing doesn't work. I mean, it will work for some people, but for most, it doesn't work. If you're not compensating, you have 30 to 60 seconds. So, I'll send a survey that has a maximum of 5 questions. An NPS standard question could be, "Here's a list of 5 features. What's the most appreciated or most preferred feature on that list?" Then, the same list for "What's the least preferred?" So, that's 3 questions. Maybe I'll throw in, "Is there anything else you want to tell us about HubSpot?" Right? And then, all of a sudden, I have a picture. Then I'm going to say, "Oh, it's interesting. We're thinking about building this thing, or they're thinking about building that thing. Let's do something next quarter or next month." But the same survey can be sent multiple times. The important thing here is that you're building a timeline. Now, all of a sudden, I can see these trends. What was really interesting—and the thing that I told you guys about—is that you should never show this information to your product team. It is the worst information. We've seen that competitive-based product teams are really bad; it just doesn't work. But I have data, and I'm happy to share it. Competitive-based marketing teams—teams that have competitive programs—typically have much better retention and lower CAC. Sorry, what? What are...?

Sam Parr

you talking about

Shaan Puri

Basically, he's saying, in explaining this, what he's saying is you learn this stuff. If you go tell the product team, "Hey, here's what they said they want," or "Here's what you should build," it screws things up.

Patrick Campbell

them up

Shaan Puri

they screws them up they don't they don't build the right stuff

Patrick Campbell

but if

Shaan Puri

you go

Patrick Campbell

it should be customer service

Shaan Puri

Team, you say, "Here's what pain points were most important to them," or "Here's what benefits were most important to them," or "Here's how they ranked these guys versus us." The marketing teams, if you have that competitive intel as part of your process, will perform better than a marketing team without that competitive intel.

Patrick Campbell

Perfect example, real-world example: We start hearing this in the early days of NetMetrix product. We realize getting accuracy for metrics is actually incredibly difficult because it's not like marketing metrics that can be 5% off. Like financial metrics, if you tell me I have this much money that's supposed to be in my bank account, I'm making decisions based off that. It has to be 99.9% [accurate], if not 100%, right? So we start feeling this just as a product team. All of a sudden, we start hearing from some of my... my "moles," if you will. And they don't know that they were these people, just to be clear.

Patrick Campbell

it's not

Patrick Campbell

Like, I turned them, and they're like, you know, there's drops and everything like that. But also, I start hearing, like, "Ah yeah, we're using it, but the accuracy sucks." Right? So all of a sudden, we start hearing this totality of information. All of a sudden, that is our core marketing strategy. Every single time, comparison pages. We didn't do that many of them, but every single comparison page is the number one thing in all of our ads, like competitive ads. That's what they were. Then, over time, all of a sudden, that became their home pages, right? Because they're reacting to us rather than us reacting to them. We found the snippet that makes the most sense, and the most, like, aggressive thing—if this doesn't sound aggressive enough—is, I have all this data. I have all this information. I've collected it, I've synthesized it, and I know...

Sam Parr

by the way do you keep that like a spreadsheet or like a notion and you're making and you're writing like narrative formats

Patrick Campbell

it depends on how I'm using it right so the data is just tracking over time right so I have I can send you like some slides or something like that so I have some slides that like I put together for when we were gonna go raise money for the first time as well because it's it's just really good data in general one thing I have is is basically spreadsheets that has a lot of this information especially the qualitative and then the other thing that I build off of this are red team docs I don't know if you guys know what those are but basically like every thought I've had or every thought that I learned from this data because this data like customer data and market data is probably 10 x more important but this is like some interesting data that's easy to talk about in a podcast but red team docs is when I look at all this data it's like what are the things that kill us every single thought that I've had that could like kill us or whole hurt us goes into a doc some of those docs get built out oh someone accuses me of x someone says this on twitter and then it it basically at minimum has here are the steps that we're gonna take so that when that thing happens all of a sudden we have a head start on the on the little critical piece of the thinking but to make a long story short the the thing that I reference with you guys is I would have like these are all funded competitors so they would try to go raise money I would have their the people they were trying to raise money from come to me like not tell me that they were trying to raise money but it's obvious because they invest in the space it's not the associate it's like the partner coming like all that kind of stuff some of them would straight up tell me like hey we're thinking of investing and so and so what do you think but what I would do then is I would show them these slides and I would just basically be like here's all the information on on us and and the person that you're thinking of investing in I wouldn't say that unless they were upfront about it and what it I I know for 1 we we killed one of the rounds that someone was trying to raise like I can tell you that definitively because one like okay I'm gonna invest in someone going against this psycho who like has all this information right like that's a pretty scary thing and then 2 like all of our numbers are better because I you know we just ended up you know doing really well at certain a certain number of things right and so that that I think is again it's a program that I think that you should have at least at a bare minimum from a marketing and go to market perspective if you have a market that becomes really competitive if you're in like the blue ocean as they say like it's probably a waste of time but it's just something where our ocean got red real quick fam quicker than

Patrick Campbell

that the

Shaan Puri

look on your face tell tell me what you're

Sam Parr

Thinking right now, I think I'm very good at research. I'm very good at doing what I do, which is finding moles, getting intel, and reverse engineering. You have said that I'm a 9 out of 10. You have mentioned some things to me that made me realize there are a couple more levels I can reach to improve. It's pretty magical; that's pretty amazing.

Patrick Campbell

Yeah, well then keep in mind, I have all this market data. That was interesting too because all of a sudden I can understand. For example, when COVID hit again, I can't look at anyone's accounts, and we're very, very strict about that. But I can see, "Oh, this sector that has 50+ accounts," which is our terms, "this sector's tanking, this sector's taking off." I can change my marketing almost instantly. When you have some competitive intel, especially on segments, like I knew the segments that our competitors were going after and I knew the segments we were going after. It just helps feed the wheel. When you're feeding the wheel and you're getting that PhD in your business, which I think is really important if you're going all in, all of a sudden, a lot of the decisions we don't have to think about because we know what's happening. We know what strings are being pulled. Let's react to it, let's respond to it, and kind of go from there.

Sam Parr

how much of your time is spent on that are sorry go ahead

Patrick Campbell

well now

Shaan Puri

it's a system best way possible

Patrick Campbell

It's a system now. So, it's a system, and I don't spend that much time with it. I just get to collect, right? It's just documentation. For example, I have names. I know I have six names that I can tell you of users of a competitor of ours. I see them pretty regularly, especially since events are back. I'm friends with a couple of them, right? I'm not hiding the fact, like, "Hey, how's it going with Competitor A?" I'm not hiding it, right? And that's the thing that, like, there's a... here where I think you're kind of being an asshole. You're being conniving. Then there's a... where you're just being smart and collecting data. I try to stay, like, obviously on that part of the divide, if that makes sense.

Shaan Puri

do you

Sam Parr

ever turn that into a business

Patrick Campbell

Yes, I think you could create a really good business around collecting NPS (Net Promoter Score) data. Honestly, G2 Crowd reviews are where there's a ton of data. I would love for someone to create this because it would just do my job, which is great. A quarterly report, kind of like the Forrester reports, could be beneficial. I think there's also a market to blow that whole business up. Give me quarterly reports instead of these reports where you call 100 people. A quarterly report on the same company or the same industry could include: - Here are the new positive reviews of a competitor. - Here are the bad negative reviews of a competitor. - Here's the NPS data, all that kind of fun stuff. And, you know, again, you have to be careful about how much you use this information. You're using it to build a profile; you're not using it to immediately react to it. That's a big mistake a lot of people make.

Sam Parr

Sean and I brainstormed this a lot. We were talking about how we both use Glassdoor reviews. Even though Glassdoor is typically filled with either fake reviews or incredibly happy employees, or disgruntled employees, there's not really a middle ground. However, you can still get a lot of interesting information from there. You also get information from LinkedIn. For example, someone might say, "I manage a pipeline of a $10,000,000 a year business." And I'm like, "Oh, thanks for telling me." We brainstormed this idea for a business that we think we called "I Spy" or something similar. It involved spying on many people in a particular industry and just sending you an email. You can use Facebook Ads Manager to see, "Oh wow, these guys just made a switch. They are now targeting older women as opposed to younger women." We called it something like "Spy Something." It's kind of funny because you worked for the NSA. You are the spy that we were talking about. So, it is kind of interesting. I do think that actually a business could be built doing this.

Patrick Campbell

I can't find this client info

Hubspot

Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform. It shares its data across every application, so every team can stay aligned. No out-of-sync spreadsheets or dueling databases. HubSpot: grow better.

Patrick Campbell

I think the problem is that I've been telling you about customer development and customer research. You should do all of this for your customers; that's what you first start with, rather than focusing on your competitors. The competitor stuff sounds sexier, right? But I think that, like, I used to talk—when I gave talks at conferences or events—all about customer development. About 15% of people care. Even when you give them the information, everyone tweets, "Oh yeah, you should talk to your customers," but only 15% of people actually do the work. Then, when you take care of the work for them and just give them the data, this is the one risk of this type of business. I'm sure there's a big business in it, but then they don't know what to do with it. All of a sudden, it's like, "Okay, you're kind of giving people information," which is probably fine because it's a vitamin. They like that they have it, but then actually implementing the information? They probably don't do it. That means, I don't know, if you get a 36-month customer, I'll take it. They don't need to be 60 months necessarily for you to build a big business.

Shaan Puri

Right, you're doing one other thing that I find fascinating. Actually, well, there's two. You said that you're buying a **shit ton** of debt for pennies on the dollar and going to forgive it. So, what's actually going on there?

Patrick Campbell

everyone wants to be mister beast on a long enough timeline everyone wants to be mister beast

Shaan Puri

that's what

Patrick Campbell

I feel

Shaan Puri

life theory I like it

Patrick Campbell

No, so like here's the thing. I'm probably going to reinvest everything that I got into this until I come to business.

Sam Parr

did you say how much how much did you make from the sale

Patrick Campbell

trying I I gotta work with a lot of people so I'm trying not to to to be super confident

Sam Parr

or under 9 figures

Patrick Campbell

I'm not gonna say what I got let's just put it that way but

Sam Parr

I asked you if it was over or under $100,000,000, and it took you a minute to think about it. So, what I'm going to assume is that it's that number, give or take 30%.

Patrick Campbell

Give or take 30%. Yeah, let's just... but like again, part of it's stock; it's not all cash. There are a lot of different factors here that I don't want to get into, but I am... I'm fine right now. Like, I'm gonna do fine, if that makes sense. So, I want to reinvest it all because, again, I'm not a car guy. I've had it for like 2 months. I went from, like, this is a fun fact: I did the whole Dave Ramsey "don't have any debt, pay off the house as soon as possible" thing. So, in January, I had $20,000 in my bank account, and I paid off the house. That was it. And then this happened, so I haven't adjusted to it, is what I'm trying to say. This might change in like 6 months, but I want to go all out—not in a way of like, you know, fancy cars and stuff like that, but in things that are really interesting and get me on the quickest path to learning. One of the reasons for the debt thing—and also, I don't know if you're gonna bring up the other one—but the debt thing was this: the debt market's just crazy. It's insane, right? It's insane how much debt there is and how that debt is purchased. I don't understand it, and this is one of the ways that I can really understand it and also do some good in the world. It's like I can buy a bunch of debt for pennies on the dollar. I can understand how that system works, how debt collectors work, how the debt collectors sell to another debt collector, and then also, like, obviously forgive some of...

Shaan Puri

The debt... simple. What debt have you bought? How are you buying debt? What debt are you buying? What are you doing with it?

Patrick Campbell

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have not actually purchased the debt yet. I am basically exploring right now. I just put some feelers out because that's the other thing: the debt market.

Sam Parr

who did you reach out to to see if you can acquire some debt

Patrick Campbell

See, that's the interesting part. That's what I was about to bring up. It's so shadowy that there's not a website that says, "We buy all the debt and then sell the debt," and all that kind of stuff. There's nothing. I have a buddy—I'm not sure if he's cool with me saying his name—but he runs a really cool subscription conference now. He used to do this, and I was asking him. He was on the board of one of these debt agent associations, like a business association. I said, "Hey man, isn't it scammy?" He was explaining to me that in that market, there's about 20% of the market that's very bad. Those are the ones you hear all the stories about, threatening people. The other part of the market, like he was in, was different. He would just call people and say, "Hey, what can you do?" He bought it for pennies on the dollar, so he would say, "Give me 30%." Great! He made money, they got it done, all that kind of stuff.

Sam Parr

of stuff

Patrick Campbell

like someone who owes that market

Sam Parr

This is like someone who owes $2,000 because they got an x-ray, took an ambulance, or, yeah, I don't know, whatever else you have credit card debt for, right?

Patrick Campbell

Yeah, and the other thing is, the reason this is interesting—and this is to kind of speak a little bit more about how I'm thinking—is that I don't want to build a quilt company. Although it would be fascinating, don't get me wrong. I’m all about the stuff Palmer Luckey is doing in defense. The work that Aaron Swartz did before his passing, in terms of opening up databases that were behind gateways but were supposed to be free, and making them free—that's the type of stuff I want to do. If you look at debt, money in politics, and defense, those are three giant areas where there are huge things holding us back. Cost and pricing in defense is a major issue. Palmer's working on it. Then there's debt; there's just so much debt. A lot of it is student debt. So, there's something interesting there about how you can make money but also not be a jerk, right? You know, take that burden off people's plates. And then, in politics, money in politics—there's something there because I don't think we're just going to magically have people wake up and say, "Let's vote against having this much money in politics." So, what's a world look like where you accelerate the money in politics and hopefully break some of the log jams? That's what I really think about in terms of post-paddle life, if that makes sense.

Shaan Puri

and sam do you wanna do anything on those otherwise there's one other yeah

Sam Parr

Well, before we get to this last one, this is interesting. But I do want to ask a quick question. You're 32, right? Or 33? How old are you?

Patrick Campbell

yeah 30 33 yeah I turn 34 in a couple months

Sam Parr

So, you're 33 or 34. You just made a huge sum of money. Have you done the math on when you will become a billionaire? I'm sure you have. How does it feel to have such a huge sum at such a young age? I mean, that's pretty wild.

Patrick Campbell

Right, here's the thing I learned. Some of your guests—actually, a friend of the show, Alex Hormozi—I talked to him a couple of weeks ago. What I told him, and he kind of agreed, was that money amplifies the worst in you and the best in you. You're just the same person, right? So, I thought when I was going to get money, I was going to be healthier because I could afford someone to yell at me about eating. But no, now I can afford to go to terrible places all the time. I could afford that before, but I think it's one of those things where I'm a big believer in something I talk a lot about. I don't know if this is interesting, but Teddy Roosevelt, of all people, wrote a speech called "The Strenuous Life." It's basically his concept, and I think it's a better speech than the one everyone references, "Man in the Arena." I think "Man in the Arena" is not as impactful compared to "The Strenuous Life." He basically said, in modern parlance, that if you've been given something—whether it's a middle-class life, upper-class life, or whatever it is—if you've had an exit, even though you worked for it, your duty is to go be strenuous again. Your duty is to go crazy and make big swings. That's why I'm talking about not wanting to go into quilting. Sure, there's a money grab there, and I think it's great, but I want to fix democracy. I want to address defense and fix debt. I want to try and tackle those types of things because I think for every person doing that, you obviously have tons of people digging ditches who have no ability to change their situation. They're leading a strenuous life that they have to. I know that sounds like people might judge that answer in multiple different ways, but yeah, I'm having fun, but I'm also all in. I'm trying to go for it. It's part of the reason we went to Paddle; I didn't want to hand over the keys because I wasn't done yet. I want to see what a company going through a public offering looks like. I want to see that so I can decide if I like it, if I want to go big next, or if I want to do more small projects. So that's kind of what I'm thinking about, if that makes sense.

Shaan Puri

When you were younger, were you kind of highly competitive at anything? Between the ages of, I don't know, 12 to 18, if you look back now, if you were like a researcher just getting to observe you behind the glass panel, would you have seen anything in the way you behaved that would lead you to think, "Oh, this guy is gonna have a really interesting career in life"? Or would you have looked like an average teenager at that time?

Patrick Campbell

Yeah, so I had a... I don't know how Sam would look at this, but I had a Midwest childhood. Let's say it was a bad Midwest childhood. The things that happened to me would clearly be considered abuse today, but maybe back then they were seen as okay. So, there was that, and I think that makes me an incredibly insecure human being. I'm incredibly insecure about most things. However, what I kind of learned—and I don't know if this was trial and error, but I had some good mentors in life—is that instead of taking that and becoming, you know, a deadbeat, I should channel it. Use that anxiety and channel it. As for the answer to your question, fun fact: I am a national champion debater. I did speech and forensics in high school.

Sam Parr

should I make the joke john

Patrick Campbell

yeah john or go for it

Shaan Puri

do what it is there you go would you consider yourself a master

Patrick Campbell

12 year olds the crap 12 year olds I love it yeah so I I did by

Shaan Puri

The way this is the thing. This segment, I don't know if you heard this, we did this segment on here. I said I observed these three patterns: people who are amazing at debate go on to do amazing things in business; people who are amazing gamers can go on to do amazing things; and then poker was maybe my other one. But those three are like... you wouldn't associate that with success in the business world, but they have like this... I just keep seeing it over and over and over again.

Patrick Campbell

Well, so you know what it is. I was doing football and wrestling and all that stuff. I had to have foot surgeries for whatever reason, and basically I was like, "Oh, I can't do wrestling that season." So, I went and started doing what's called forensics when you're in high school. I realized you can get scholarships, so I went to the school I attended on scholarship to do this. It was one of the best schools in the country for it—Bradley University. It's a lovely school, but the Northwestern kids would make fun of us in Illinois, saying you get a public school education at a private school price, basically unless you're on scholarship. If you think about it, what I was doing in college for 40 hours a week for four years was synthesizing information, structuring arguments, and getting to the root cause—right? Those are the things we always talk about. I never wanted to go into business; my dad still thinks I should be a doctor. I was going to go into law, but more people were graduating from law school than there were actual legal jobs when I graduated. So, long story short, it was one of those things where I realized I can synthesize information really quickly. I talk a little faster and all this other stuff, and I think that's helped me a lot. Because literally, our marketing strategy in the early days was that I just wrote blog posts, and I can write them pretty quickly. They're relatively deep; they're not all gems, but you know, it's one of those things that definitely helped me, and I probably use it every day.

Sam Parr

you wanna go to the last one sean this is the most interesting one

Shaan Puri

You're doing a hostile takeover of a publicly traded company. So, I saw this... it's this guy. I don't know how you say it; I've only heard Mike say it.

Sam Parr

in the background

Shaan Puri

k mikey m is his like handle

Patrick Campbell

so there's this guy yeah yeah

Shaan Puri

tell the story who's this guy what did he do with it what the heck are you doing

Patrick Campbell

Okay, so again, the quickest path to learning—that's really important for entrepreneurs and executives in general. Mike Merrill, like 13 years ago, in 2008 or something like that, became the first publicly traded person. He sold shares in himself. There's an interface; the website is a little buggy sometimes, but there's an interface. He sold shares, he gets the money, but then what he does is he gets to choose to put votes up. The people who bought shares vote with their shares. He doesn't do little stuff; he does things like, "What color glasses should I get?" A lot of the things we probably don't want to make decisions on ourselves, which is a really interesting hack. But he also goes and puts up questions like, "Should I move in with my girlfriend?" He puts that up for a vote. The debate is fascinating because some of them are his friends and family, and then there are just random people in Connecticut being like, "I've known Mike for a long time through the project. I don't think this makes sense. He said this like 3 years ago," blah, blah, blah. It's fascinating. So, I knew about this girlfriend...

Sam Parr

the what's the url again say that spell it out

Patrick Campbell

K MikeyM.com. So, I got a little money and I was like, "I don't know what it's like to do a takeover of a company," right? This was when Elon Musk was doing his stuff with Twitter. Long story short, I thought, "Oh, this could be fascinating." One, because I don't know how people react when this stuff happens. He put an auction up for additional shares. This is what he does every so often when he needs some cash. He'll actually put an auction up, and people can buy, presumably if it's a Dutch auction, under the share price. Right? And I did like the way to...

Shaan Puri

do you get anything as a shareholder you there's no dividends there's no like rep share

Patrick Campbell

Sell your shares. People buy shares, so like I put my shares up and get money. Like, I actually get cash, right?

Sam Parr

Dude, look at Sean. Go to the website. I'm so... he just says a thing. So, look, let me give you an example. It's called the Fingerholers Contract Gig. I guess Fingerholers is the name of the company. But the short, the TL;DR is: Should I take a short-term gig contract coordinating the development of a community around the launch of an NFT project called Finger Holders?

Patrick Campbell

should he take a job yeah

Sam Parr

And then it goes into the whole background of why I'm interested in this. Why do I want to do this? What are the contract details? How much are they going to pay me? What's the proposal? Then there are 300 comments. I think there's a crazy amount of comments that say things like, "Pros: working on a project sounds fun." Cons: "NFTs are divisive and it may alienate some of your shareholders." There's an incredibly thoughtful discussion on why he's totally for or against it.

Patrick Campbell

What? So, listen to this. I sneakily start buying shares and I begin researching people who haven't been active. You can see the last time they logged in and stuff because I want to start contacting them. He launches this auction of about 2,000 shares, and I know that most votes—there are only about 5,000 shares that are voting. So, I was like, "Cool! If I get 2,000 shares, which is like 10-11% of the entire thing..." Then, I did a sneaky way of doing the auction, which we can get into if it's interesting. But anyway, I get the shares, and then I go speak at his shareholder meeting. He has a shareholder meeting.

Shaan Puri

how much did you pay for the 2,000 shares

Patrick Campbell

it's like $13 and so so

Sam Parr

then his market cap is only like is is

Patrick Campbell

It's not... it's not $130,000 where everyone gets in. Yeah, so right now he's got, I think, 16,000 shares or something that have been sold. The share price, I haven't checked today, but there's a share price that goes up and down based on purchases and stuff.

Sam Parr

like that worth it it's in the 6 figure range I think ballpark

Patrick Campbell

I'd think so, yeah. So, if you owned all the shares, theoretically, that's the value. But then the other thing is, the community makes it interesting. I go speak at the shareholder conference and I say, "Listen, I'm doing a hostile takeover of Mike. Here's why: I think the project's undervalued. You guys voted to make him not go on social media; that doesn't make sense. In order to get more people, he has to do this." And then all the questions are like, "Well, what about Mike? Is this good for him?" Because there are a lot of his friends, like his actual in-person friends.

Sam Parr

oh my god

Patrick Campbell

And I was like, "Listen, I think what's good for the share price is good for Mike, and vice versa." I talk about it... it's like a half-hour interview I did. And then everyone... there's all these people, especially the ones who don't know him, who are like, "I think, Patrick, I think the takeover is good for the project. I think it's this and..."

Shaan Puri

You only gave the advice: "Your lulls 500 to 1,000 more shares, roughly, to control the vote," you thought.

Patrick Campbell

no no no I already I already had I got 1930 out of the auction

Shaan Puri

right right but you said each vote has about 5,000 and you just need yeah

Patrick Campbell

Yeah, you just need 51%. It's never one-sided. It's never one-sided. So, like, if it's 25,100, 25,100...

Shaan Puri

can swing whatever vote

Patrick Campbell

And what's funny is I'm texting him and I'm like, "Hey man, just so you know, here are my intentions." It's like a little takeover, right?

Sam Parr

that that that's cool that's some insider trading though no

Patrick Campbell

no I didn't I didn't do anything it's like elon elon

Shaan Puri

Elon goes and talks to Parag. He's like, "Hey, look, I'm doing this and here's what I want to do with Twitter. Also, there's kind of nothing you can do about it, but I'm going to inform you because that just seems like the standard, the right process here."

Sam Parr

Yeah, what does... what obligation does this guy have to follow what you say? Like, what if he just says, "Fuck off, I'm done with this project"?

Patrick Campbell

In, I mean, he could shut the project down. I don't know. So first, before I started doing this, I began tweeting to him about what happens if there's a hostile takeover. Elon Musk seems interesting, right? Because I wanted to see, like, is this going to be a good investment? Probably not, but I'm learning. I can't tell you how much I'm learning, right? Because all of a sudden, it's like, "Oh, interesting shareholder made." They responded to this, and these aren't like the investors that I want to be working with for the rest of my life, but it's really fascinating. He has never, to my knowledge, in 13 years, gone against what a vote has said.

Sam Parr

but he could it's it's it's all in good faith

Patrick Campbell

he could I mean there's no yeah there's no like oh my god I I can sue him or anything

Shaan Puri

He gets to choose what he puts up for vote. So if he's like, "Yes, you know, I just want to move on with my girlfriend," he doesn't have to put it up for a vote.

Patrick Campbell

But there has been some talk of having to burn some of your shares in order to put up a vote, which is fascinating. It's been covered by *Wired*, *The Atlantic*, and all kinds of other outlets. It was in a lull, and I'm injecting some excitement into it again.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I'm looking at the price chart. So it looks like it started in 2008. It opened at $1.99, it looks like, and it basically was between $1-3. Then it kind of peaked in 2013 - maybe it got some press or something like that. It was... yeah, $13.50 or something like that. And then for the last 6 years, it's basically been flat at roughly $4-5.

Patrick Campbell

for a takeover

Shaan Puri

and and now it's 685 right now and so this is

Patrick Campbell

5 when I started the takeover

Sam Parr

this is far more interesting to be as small as it is right I mean to be as

Patrick Campbell

so cool

Sam Parr

To be as unknown of a project as it is, it feels... it's been around since 2008. It's pretty under the radar, so this is covered, right?

Patrick Campbell

Well, so in the beginning, he got a lot of attention. He was on the Today Show and all kinds of stuff. What was interesting is he's had some epics with it, like a project that I think was called "The Girlfriend Project." It was literally about his relationships. His ex-girlfriend buys shares, and I'm pretty sure his current... I don't know if it's his wife or not, but she is also a shareholder. The end of the shareholders meeting featured his ex-girlfriend and his current girlfriend or wife having a conversation. It was the most interesting half hour I've ever seen in my life because they were just talking. They seem to be friendly; I think they might be friends. It's kind of beautiful because you have all these people who are there just from a money perspective, or just a fascination perspective—in my case—or from a love perspective, supporting this guy and trying to make the right decisions for him. I think it's brilliant. As soon as I announced this on Twitter, we got some inbound from, like, some documentarians or something like that. I don't know if it'll come with anything, but it's a fascinating story that I think deserves more attention. So I'm glad you asked about it because you guys have a pretty medium audience, so it's great.

Shaan Puri

There's even like a question: "What happens when I die?" Unlike a company, I will die. So, what happens to my shares after I die? This is pretty crazy. I mean, it kind of makes no sense in that, like, yeah, exactly. It's completely nonsensical because, yeah.

Sam Parr

But, bro, you bought a $150,000 image of a monkey. So, like, this is... you know, like, did...?

Patrick Campbell

you buy

Patrick Campbell

an ape

Shaan Puri

the punk

Patrick Campbell

you got a oh you're a punk guy this is from ape fest so this is my nice this is my fun little yeah

Shaan Puri

It was a 50/50 coin flip to use the Milk Road portfolio. Either we buy an Ape or a Punk, and they were the same price on that day. We knew that the purchase was going to have to happen; the Board Ape was about to buy the Punks. So it was like, "Which asset should we buy now, knowing this news is about to break or has just broken?" We flipped for Punk, and then Apes went through the roof while Punks have...

Patrick Campbell

been flat or down everything's down now too it's interesting very interesting

Sam Parr

Dude, check this out! If you go to Mike's blog at [news.kmikeem.com](http://news.kmikeem.com), it's run like a shareholder company. I mean, it's like the investor relations page of a publicly traded company. He has a list of all of his principles. On health, it says, "As of October 23, 2019, I'm in favor of experimenting with psychedelics." You can click on "psychedelics," and there's notes from a board meeting about who voted, why they voted, and what the reasoning is. It explains how they are or are not going to start doing psychedelics. Then, in 2016, he mentions, "I will not take a psilocybin pill." I don't know what that is, but it talks about why he wanted to take them, and everyone is voting. He has an update on that. For entertainment, he states, "Shareholders will have direct control over my television watching." In 2019, he says, "I will watch Spider-Man." There are subscriptions mentioned too. Yeah, yeah, he says, "I will not subscribe to Spotify."

Shaan Puri

This... yeah, some of these are like stupid. Like the glasses one, it says that 34 users voted with 1,800 shares.

Patrick Campbell

yes I see

Shaan Puri

So, 34 people participated in that vote for the glasses. I guess that was not a very big one. Let's see this and if...

Patrick Campbell

I move over this one

Patrick Campbell

I haven't... I'm pretty sure I know who he's voting for, like, president. He's done stuff like that as well, which gets really fascinating.

Sam Parr

yeah but that's just as meaningless as the classes thing interesting

Patrick Campbell

yeah that's

Shaan Puri

true he is in

Patrick Campbell

I

Patrick Campbell

Believe he's in Oregon, so I'm not sure. I mean, he's in a state that is going to vote one way or the other anyways. Wow.

Sam Parr

yeah 2020 I will endorse bernie sanders for president

Shaan Puri

Okay, amazing! Listen, man, this is fun. I'm glad you came on.

Patrick Campbell

I think

Shaan Puri

you brought some good stuff but sam what'd you think

Sam Parr

Dude, can you send me the research thing? That was the most fascinating thing. It was really interesting. I will.

Patrick Campbell

I'll send you some redacted I'll send you the structure and you can fill it

Sam Parr

No, no one will. I won't share it with any of these losers. It'll just be for me. Don't redact it.

Patrick Campbell

let me think about it I'm at again I have a boss I'm on a board I gotta be careful now so yeah

Sam Parr

yeah yeah well are you guys

Patrick Campbell

I'll send you something

Sam Parr

and peddle isn't public now but it will be right

Patrick Campbell

I mean we're we're not going next year a number of years probably before anything like

Sam Parr

that happens

Patrick Campbell

but I'm

Sam Parr

great you know there's no laws

Patrick Campbell

I'll hook you up I'll hook you up with something don't worry don't worry

Sam Parr

This was awesome! I typically hate... no, I wouldn't say hate. I usually say no to everyone, but Sean brought you in.

Shaan Puri

We kinda hate having guests, but that's okay. We have them anyway. We're not fully sure why we do it, but we do. In the moment, it seems like a good idea. Halfway through the episode, it's like, "Ah, I kinda wish I was just bullshitting with Sam instead of doing this conversation."

Sam Parr

I'm always happy when we do it because I don't have to prepare. But you are one of the...

Shaan Puri

1 out of every 4 is awesome, and I'll just hope that everybody thinks they're that 1 out of 4. You actually were that 1 out of 4, so good for you.

Patrick Campbell

what makes a good guess versus not a good guess

Patrick Campbell

just for

Patrick Campbell

the audience to hear

Shaan Puri

If they come close to the pod, if they already know the vibe, if they know what's cool, that tends to work really well. I think. What do you think, Sam?

Sam Parr

I agree. Most people aren't like Sean and I in that they don't do this for a living. They need to come prepared with the things. Even us, we do research sometimes; we do, sometimes we don't. But there's at least bullet points, so it's like, "Alright, next." You did a good job of saying "next." A lot of people, if you... I don't know if you paid attention, but Sean very purposely, in the beginning, said, "I don't really care about the company and your background. We'll just move on to the other stuff." We actually tend to do that a lot, and so that was cool.

Patrick Campbell

That episode was interesting, except for Michael Saylor. That episode was like... that episode was money because he was just so weird. It was just like, "What's gonna happen, guys? What's gonna happen the next minute?" That was an interesting one.

Sam Parr

Did you hear when he out-alfied me? I was like, "Yeah, I like fast cars." He goes, "I don't like fast cars, but I have a really fast jet."

Patrick Campbell

That's well, no. The quote I tell everyone from that episode is, "Yeah, I don't really like things that you can't, in normal use, go at their max speed." Like, that's what he was referring to with cars. It was like boats and jets. I'm allowed to go at max speed, you know? Cars, not really. So I just... I...

Shaan Puri

Just, I thought, who even has that thought about, "Am I utilizing this machine to its fullest velocity?"

Patrick Campbell

A guy, if not, I'm not interested. Most of his balance sheet is in Bitcoin. That's who has that thought, which is great. I love that those people exist.

Sam Parr

Dude, Sean, did you see my Instagram or Twitter or something? This weekend, I was in the Hamptons. That's not a humble brag; it was my in-laws' house, so I had nothing to do with it. But... and that's...

Patrick Campbell

a midwest thing he just did a midwest thing just so you know

Sam Parr

the very midwest

Shaan Puri

oh I

Patrick Campbell

have a yeah I have an equinox member but like they're gonna do my laundry so it's like worth

Shaan Puri

it's worth it like I'm not

Patrick Campbell

a big time guy not a big time guy yeah that's what he said

Sam Parr

It was my in-laws' house, and I went out there. We drove to the beach for a bonfire on the 4th. On the way, we passed an area that was like a small one-lane road, and it was packed full of cars. But they were fancy cars. In front of me was a Bugatti, and it was a special Bugatti. I looked it up, and it was like a $5,000,000 Bugatti. I was like, "What the heck is going on here?" So, I get to the parking lot to park my car, and it was full of black limousines—not just regular limousines, but Escalades. There were tons of them. Then, in the corner, one of the limos had its trunk open, and literally, I'm not exaggerating, I have a video of it—100 limousine drivers were just hanging out, drinking Coke and eating chips. I was like, "What the heck is going on here?" They told me, "It's Michael Rubin's party." Michael Rubin has a famous white party, and I made a joke: "He only lets whites in," which they didn't like.

Shaan Puri

chill with the drivers no

Sam Parr

yeah yeah I was like you know like oh whites only really that's weird maybe I should go

Patrick Campbell

I

Sam Parr

I don't know, it was a bad joke. Anyway, I go, "Ruben?" and they go, "Yeah, it's Ruben. He's having this party. It's famous." He goes, "I drove this one guy." I was like, "Yeah?" He says, "We drove Drake." Then this other guy was like, "Yeah, Jay-Z's there." I was like, "Wait, really?" I looked it up on Instagram, and there was this crazy party. I was like, "Well, tell me everything." He goes, "You know, I drove this guy, and he's broke." One guy goes, "I drove Tyrese. Remember Tyrese from Fast and Furious?"

Shaan Puri

yeah yeah

Sam Parr

Yeah, he's like, "I drove that guy," and the driver goes, "I'm richer than he is. That guy's broker than a joke. I got more money than that guy." I was like, "Wait, what? Really?" He kept dishing it out and telling me all this. He goes, "The guys who are really rich, they typically drive themselves because they got that Bugatti and they want to show it off." It was really fascinating. We hung with them for like half an hour, just asking them all about rumors and gossip, and they knew it all.

Shaan Puri

Dude, that's amazing! After you sent me that video, I went on Instagram and saw like six NBA players posting stories from the party. So, it was like James Harden was at the party... and then, you know, other guys like Joel Embiid were there too. It's the all-white party where everybody's... it was just rappers and athletes, it seemed like, which is great!

Sam Parr

Exactly! It was so cool. He's got this private beach area, and then we were like 100 yards down the beach. It's right next to the parking lot, and it was just packed. There was a Bugatti because there were all these crazy cars. It was pretty... it was amazing.

Shaan Puri

Pretty wild! You know that meme where it's the guy at the party yelling into the girl's ear? You're just like, "It's a newsletter! We send it daily."

Patrick Campbell

it's a marketing automation company like technically I'm there but like you know

Shaan Puri

the full snapshot

Patrick Campbell

of your

Shaan Puri

customers in one crm

Patrick Campbell

no I said in austin

Sam Parr

my first million I said million

Shaan Puri

Yeah, yeah, no, no, no. With an "M." Do you use Spotify? We're on there. We got video access on there.

Patrick Campbell

no we mostly talk

Patrick Campbell

about 12 year old stuff but

Patrick Campbell

it's pretty cool yeah

Shaan Puri

sean no

Patrick Campbell

he's not here

Shaan Puri

he doesn't leave his house

Patrick Campbell

sometimes he has long hair sometimes he has short hair I don't know no

Shaan Puri

I'm not at my in laws live here that's my in laws

Patrick Campbell

Don't live here. No, my dad-in-law is jacked more than I am. It's kind of uncomfortable sometimes. That's messed up.

Sam Parr

That bit will not get old for a while. That's awesome! I guess we should... we gotta end there, right? Yeah, yeah. Thanks for coming, dude.