How This Gardener Made Millions In His Backyard

Shaan Puri

He quit his job, and in the first year, he actually hits $5,000 a month. So, he even surpasses his one-year goal, and he just keeps going. In his first year, he made $60,000; in the second year, around $100,000; in the third year, $250,000; in the fourth year, $7,000,000. By the fifth year, it just keeps growing. Today, this business does over $30,000,000 a year.

Sam Parr

No way! Are you kidding me?

Shaan Puri

Sam, do you want to start with updog?

Sam Parr

I might as well.

Shaan Puri

Thought I might catch a sleep in there.

Sam Parr

That's like...

Shaan Puri

Just gave it to me.

Sam Parr

That's way below you.

Shaan Puri

You should've just given it to me.

Sam Parr

Alright, before we start, I want to dedicate this podcast, Sean, to two groups of people. I've had run-ins with these two groups, and I've taken for granted how special they are. The first group is people who start businesses and are English speakers but are not native English speakers. It's insane! I recently hung out with a few friends who are entrepreneurs, and they don't speak English natively. That's so impressive! I take it for granted so much until I have to communicate with someone in a different language. That's amazing, so I wanted to dedicate this pod to them. The second group is people who start businesses and are not wealthy. They are just starting their businesses, trying to make their dreams come true while they have newborns or little kids. How impressive is that? I kind of took that for granted. My parents did that when I was younger, and I didn't realize it until now. Now that I have a kid, I realize how scary that is. So, I want to dedicate this podcast to those two groups of people.

Shaan Puri

Wow, good guy points! Okay, I like it. Dedication accepted. Shout out to all those groups!

Sam Parr

I have a few interesting things to share with you today. Do you have a few interesting things, or what?

Shaan Puri

I have two things you're gonna like. What do you got? I'm gonna take you on a journey, so Sam, buckle up because I got a little something for you. I'm gonna tell you about a journey I went down, and it starts with a tweet I saw that was very interesting. You know, Bitcoin hit an all-time high price, and AI's taken off. I wasn't in... I'm not interested. What I was interested in is a picture of a guy holding a giant avocado, and I was like, "What is this?"

Trailer

Here's what he said.

Shaan Puri

He goes, "These are the best avocados I've ever had. They were grown by my 93-year-old Japanese neighbor." I've had to use Google Translate to talk to her about the variety, and she thinks it might be one that just grew from this specific seed. If that's true, this could be a new landmark variety. The Hass avocado was discovered in a similar fashion and is now the most popular avocado in the world. This avocado that I found cannot be propagated with normal methods. It doesn't take well to air layering. I don't know what this means, he says, so I'm going to have to start with the seed. I'm going to have to grow it out from the tree. I'm going to have to cut it from the mature tree and graft it onto its own seed. I don't even know what any of this means. But then he's like, "And then I'm going to try to recreate this avocado. It will probably be a three-year experiment. Wish me luck!" And so I saw this, and I thought, what a noble quest.

Trailer

I said.

Sam Parr

What does this avocado teach me about life?

Shaan Puri

No, what has life led me to? To make my life about this avocado? Because I am so fully invested in this three-year journey about this guy who's going to try to grow a better avocado. It led me down a rabbit hole about him and about the avocado. So the guy is this guy named Kevin Espiritu. Do you know this guy? He calls himself the "Plant Daddy" on Twitter.

Sam Parr

No, but I'm in.

Shaan Puri

You don't know this guy. I'm in.

Sam Parr

No, yeah, I think.

Shaan Puri

You do, when I just started describing people. So, he's got a pretty amazing story. I'm going to first tell you his story, then I'm going to come back to the avocado. We're going to Tarantino this a little bit. Alright, so this guy basically used to work at Scribe, the book-in-a-box company. They help you produce books. He was an early employee there. On the side, he had hobbies like video games and online poker, and he was just playing nonstop. To get away from his online addiction, he thought, "You know what? I'm going to start gardening." He and his brother had a quote in the article: they said, "Hey, let's go hit up a nursery." They went to a plant nursery and were like, "Alright, we don't know anything about gardening, but we want to do something away from a computer, outside, with our hands." They bought a bunch of stuff and tried to figure it out. They went online, looking up blogs to learn. Along the way, he started blogging his journey. While he was at Scribe, his little blog began to get some traffic because he was posting his experiments. He was very relatable because he was an absolute beginner. People who were Googling were also absolute noobs and started to like this. Eventually, he thought, "You know what? I'm going to quit my job." At the time, the blog was making, I don't know, $16,000 to $17,000 a year—so roughly $2,000 a month, a little bit more than that, right? So, a little less than $2,000 a month. Sorry. He quits his job and decides, "I'm going to go all in on this thing." At the time, he was all about this one type of gardening called hydroponic gardening.

Sam Parr

Is that like where the plant is raised? Is that?

Trailer

Right, yeah.

Sam Parr

It's like not in the soil, and it's like in water.

Shaan Puri

Something like that, I said exactly. I have no idea. Alright, so he creates r/hydro, which is like a Reddit community. He starts building a community around other people who are interested in the same type of thing he's doing. Along the way, he's like, "Oh dude, I think this hydroponic thing is a little too niche." He rebrands it into something called Epic Gardening. Epic Gardening today is huge. He's got like...

Sam Parr

Dude, I'm on the website and I'm looking at his social numbers. Holy crap!

Shaan Puri

He's got like 2,000,000 on TikTok, 2,000,000 on YouTube, and 1,000,000 people on Twitter. His Twitter pops off, so he's done really, really well with his epic gardening content. He's just a dude in a baseball cap, super relatable. When you watch his videos, he's just a very likable guy. He's got the gift that you need when you're going to do this type of content. He keeps going and, for 10 years, essentially bootstraps this company. It starts with a $10 domain and he pays $5 for hosting. He was like, "Alright, I'm going to try to get this thing." His goal was to reach $3,000 a month because $3,000 a month means he can live off of this blog revenue. He quit his job, and in the first year, he actually hits $5,000 a month, surpassing his one-year goal. He just keeps going. In the first year, he makes $60,000; in the second year, around $100,000; in the third year, $250,000; in the fourth year, $7,000,000; and in the fifth year, it just keeps growing. Today, this business does over $30,000,000 a year.

Sam Parr

No way! Are you kidding me?

Shaan Puri

And he just raised a huge amount of money from Churnin, the same guys who backed Eater, Barstool, and others. They have this content-to-commerce idea, and they're like, "This guy in the gardening niche is gonna be able to do big things." He had already kind of proven it. So, what he did was he was doing pretty well with the content. He was just learning. He said, "Dude, I've been on YouTube for so long, you know, basically 10 years now. I'll just keep evolving with whatever the new meta game is of YouTube." What ends up happening is that in 2020, things take off during COVID. So, COVID was the big inflection point that really took this from moderately successful to very successful. Two things happened with COVID. First, his channel all of a sudden started adding like 15,000 subscribers a day because the same thing he had felt when he was like, "Dude, I'm just so sick of being inside on my computer. I wanna get outside and do some gardening." The whole world basically felt that when COVID hit, and so a lot of people got interested in this. Then he's like, "Cool, all my money up till that..."

Shaan Puri

Was ads and affiliates, right? So just like YouTube AdSense, YouTube ad revenue, and then, you know, affiliate links to products. And finally, he's like, "Was...?"

Sam Parr

He is doing $30,000,000 that way. $30,000,000 in YouTube ads.

Shaan Puri

No, no, no. Way less than that. He was doing like, you know, less than $1,000,000 doing that. But then he decides, "Alright, I'm gonna launch a product." He's like, "I'm gonna create a gardening product." So he imports a product from Australia, and immediately it works. He's like, "Oh, this is kind of a good idea," and he starts to sell that product. You know, the beautiful thing about these creator businesses, right? We've talked about Mr. Beast and Logan Paul with Prime, Mr. Beast with Feastables. The mass creators, what they do is they take a mass market product, like, you know, Gatorade or chocolate, and they're like, "Cool, we'll sell this commodity product using our branding." They use their branding to get into retail. Well, for the medium, like, they're the mid-tier creators, like this guy or, you know, like us, for example, you have to actually create a niche product that's gonna be higher ticket, higher value, and you're gonna use your audience to do it. So what's cool about this is you create something that's called negative CAC. So what does negative CAC mean? Every business otherwise has a sales and marketing...

Sam Parr

Talk dirty to me, baby. I love negative feedback. Keep going!

Shaan Puri

**Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)** is the amount of money you have to spend in marketing or sales to get a customer. For most businesses, this is maybe **20%**, **30%**, **40%**, or even **50%**. For some companies, it can be as high as **80%** of their revenues, which is just how much it costs to market and acquire a customer. With a media business like this, what ends up happening is you get **negative CAC**. This means he gets paid **$1 to $2 million** a year for his YouTube content and his blog. He's making money on that, and that's his customer acquisition channel. It's like a kind of unfair advantage. This is what the folks at **Churnin** are really smart about doing. Shout out to **Mike Kearns** over at Churnin, where they recognize and identify that some of these creators have high trust and high authority in a niche. They actually have a business model where, instead of spending **30%** or **40%** of your revenue on acquiring customers, you have negative CAC. It's not just **0**; it's better than **0**. You actually have a profitable media company that is being used to acquire these customers. That's the beauty of it. He then jumped from making, you know, let's say **$1 million** a year to **$7 million**, then from **$7 million** to **$20 million**, and now he's over **$30 million** a year in revenue. The other cool thing is he's bolted on some acquisitions.

Sam Parr

Alright everyone, a quick break to tell you about HubSpot. This one's really easy for me to talk about because I'm going to show you a real-life example. I've got this company called Hampton (joinhampton.com). It's a community for founders doing between $2,000,000 all the way up to $250,000,000 a year in revenue. One of the ways that we've grown is by creating these cool surveys. We have a lot of founders who have high net worth, and we'll ask them all types of questions that people typically are embarrassed to ask but that provide a lot of value. So, things like how much the founders pay themselves each month, how much money they're spending each month, what their payroll looks like, and if they're optimistic about the next year in their business. All these questions that people are afraid to ask, but we ask them anyway, and they tell us in this anonymous survey. What we do is create a landing page using HubSpot's landing page tool. It basically has a landing page that says, "Here are all the questions we asked. Give us your email if you want to access it." I shared this page on Twitter, and we were able to get thousands of people who gave us their email and told us they wanted this survey. I could see where they came from—social media, Twitter, LinkedIn, basically everywhere else that they could possibly come from. I'm able to track all of that. Then, I can see over the next handful of weeks how many of those people actually signed up and became members of Hampton. In other words, I can see how much revenue came from this survey and how much revenue came from each traffic source. The best part is I can see how much revenue came from it. A lot of times, it takes a ton of work to make that happen, but HubSpot made that super, super easy. If you're interested in doing this, you could check it out at hubspot.com. The link's in the description, and I'll also put the link to the survey that I did so you can actually see the landing page and how it works and everything like that. I'm just going to do that call to action then, and it's free! Check it out in the description. Alright, now back to MFM. Hold on, what's he selling?

Shaan Puri

He's got like a seed product, so they have some tray seed stuff. I don't know anything about this. It was called Botanical Seeds, and he bought that company. Actually, that's not the one he started; he bought that because they had retail distribution. They were in like 4,000 to 5,000 stores. So he's like, "Cool, let me buy this because I know that my audience will help grow this." Right? This is what I did with Shepherd too. It's like, "Let me buy this company that is already a good business, knowing that my audience will acquire a bunch of customers for it." And like, that's what happened with Shepherd. We basically tripled the business using this strategy. He's doing the same thing in the gardening niche. So he bought the seed business, and then he bought this houseplant business, which is actually a cool story. He's like, "During COVID, I really wanted houseplants." I think you guys talked about this with trends too, like...

Sam Parr

The trend we talked about a year and a half ago, I think before the pandemic, was about succulents. People were wanting to buy succulents online, and there weren't a lot of options.

Shaan Puri

You were totally right. You were ahead of the trend. What he did was, he was like, "Cool, should I start creating this content?" He realized that, in the growth of any entrepreneur, you eventually start to realize that sometimes it's actually easier to buy than to build. So, what he did was, he thought, "Well, I could try to create all these articles and rank for them in SEO," or he found this website called "yourhouseplant.com." He noticed that it actually had good content and solid SEO; they just didn't have any business around it. He thought, "I think I could make this product a lot better, but I could get this off to a head start." So, he did a WHOIS lookup and found out that some Indian VC owned this as a side project. He bought it for $1,000, and then immediately, in month one, he was making more than $1,000 off this thing. He then grew that property. He's done this a few times and raised money from Churnan to be able to do more of these. I think this guy is amazing. I've asked him so many times to invest because I'm like, "Dude, you are going to win, and you're going to win in such a big way it's going to shock people." As I'm saying it now, it sounds pretty cool and obvious, especially as his growth happens. But like 10 years ago, it was so non-obvious. Even 4 or 5 years ago, when COVID started to get more popular, it was like, "Okay, cool, you're a YouTuber. Okay, cool, you're a YouTuber with an e-commerce shop." I say, "No, no, no. You are going to be the most trusted influencer in the gardening niche." Look at how many full retail brick-and-mortar stores are selling fertilizer and different things like that. He can take this huge if he does this right. Now, it's just going to be a question of how fast his business development can level up with the content skills he already has.

Sam Parr

And he's got the look. I'm looking at his Instagram; he's wearing flannel, he's got a nice smile. He's basically like... what's it called? Chip and Joanna? Yeah.

Shaan Puri

Gaines... yeah, the Gaines.

Sam Parr

He’s got that type of vibe where I look at him and I'm like, "You're relatable. I trust you." You're somehow a little bit aspirational... a little bit. That sounded like an insult; I didn't mean for it to sound like that. But this is awesome! And dude, these guys at Churnin have done this so many times. They did it with Meateater, who we talked about a few podcasts ago. They did it with Cars and Bids and Doug DeMuro. This is like, when people say they're going to do this, I often think it's at a small scale. These guys are doing it at a multi, multi, multi-billion dollar scale. It's really cool.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, exactly. So, I think this is amazing. Now, let me circle back to the avocado thing. He says, "I'm going to do this three-year avocado mission," and he mentions something about the Hass avocado. So, I go look it up. I'm like, "Where did this Hass avocado come from?" I learned a couple of things. Number one, it's not pronounced "Hass," it's "Hass." So, we're all saying it wrong. That's the first thing I learned. Second thing, do you know this story? Have you heard the story about the Hass avocado?

Sam Parr

No. Why would... No. Alright.

Shaan Puri

So basically, avocados were absolutely not popular back in the day. Nobody ate them because they didn't taste very good.

Sam Parr

For not even like in Mexico.

Shaan Puri

No, they were not. They were just not a popular fruit. It was a green product that didn't taste very good, and it wasn't even branded very well. Some people called them avocados, some called them alligator pears, and in Mexico, they referred to them by the native word for "testicle." They would say, "Yeah, you want to go eat a testicle?" So, nobody really liked this fruit. Enter Rudolph Haas. Rudolph Haas was basically a mailman from Milwaukee who was now living in California. He decided he wanted to plant an avocado tree, so he went and bought some seeds. He tried to plant it, but he had to do some grafting process to get the tree to take, and it didn't work. He thought about just cutting it down, but he never got around to it, so he let the tree grow. After about a year or two, his kids noticed that there was fruit on it. They plucked it, opened it up, and the kids really liked it. This is how the story goes: the kids really liked it, and he was like, "Oh, why are you eating that? That's not good." They replied, "No, it's great!" He tried it and was surprised, saying, "Oh, this is actually really good! It's way creamier, it has a kind of nutty taste, and there was way more space between the seed and the peel." It was softer, creamier, and there was just more of the actual filling. He thought, "Wow, these are actually really good!" So, he started eating them. Word began to spread, and he partnered with a local nursery. He asked, "Hey, can you help me grow more of this tree? This tree is bearing this amazing fruit." The nursery agreed, saying, "Cool, yeah, we'll do more of this tree, and we'll give you some royalty off this thing." Now, Hass avocados make up about 80% of worldwide avocado sales. These trees are planted all around the world, in Mexico, China, and everywhere. This is the dominant fruit.

Sam Parr

And it's not even that old. He patented it in 1935, so we're talking about avocados as we know them today being less than 100 years old.

Shaan Puri

So now, here are a couple of interesting things I found from this. Number one, a lot of fruits are like this. They actually start kind of **shitty**; they don't taste very good. Then, through a process of **artificial selection**—not natural selection—you find the good-tasting fruit, and then it becomes the dominant species because that's the one everybody wants to eat. I just didn't really think about that too much.

Sam Parr

Yeah, like an old banana from over 100 years ago tasted like a carrot. They weren't as sweet. That's happened with a lot of our fruit; it's gotten sweeter and sweeter. For example, there's the Honeycrisp apple and even a cotton candy apple right now. A lot of health advocates are saying, "Dude, you shouldn't even eat modern fruit because it's not exactly how it used to be." And the health benefits are...

Shaan Puri

Aren't even the same properties in it because it's a different thing, right? Optimize for taste. So, a couple of more interesting facts. Number one, this guy, even though he said he got a fruit patent—which I was like, "What the hell is a fruit patent?"—he didn't make much money off this thing. I don't think he really had the patent; I don't think he really benefited from it. His son, Charles, came out and told the LA Times that even though his dad created "the greatest avocado in the world," his total royalties for his lifetime are $48,100—less than $5,000 he made off of discovering this. And I say "discovering" because he didn't invent this. He didn't mean to do it; he didn't manually try to create this. He discovered it, and even he says this. He goes, "It was an act of God that I discovered this fruit." So, I found that interesting. The third thing I found interesting was the marketing behind this. Even though this thing tasted good, it didn't take off right away. One of the reasons why is that an avocado doesn't look like most fruits. Most fruits are colorful; they look very appetizing. The reason they called it the "alligator pear" was because the skin was basically wrinkly and tough, like the way an avocado that we all know looks. So, nobody wanted to eat it. They were like, "This thing looks bad," and so nobody would even try it. Then, the Fruit Association of California comes together and does probably what is the greatest act of any committee ever. They were like, "Look, a couple of things. Number one, we can't keep calling this shit 'testicles' and 'alligator pears.' We gotta come up with one name that we like." Alright, we're going with "avocado." Everybody needs to call this the same thing so that this can spread in popularity. The next thing that they did that was very, very smart was they said, "Cool, why aren't people buying these?" They were like, "Well, because they look like they've gone bad." Right? They're dark; it's like black, basically. It looks like fruit that's gone bad. So, they said, "Alright, new marketing campaign. We're gonna put stickers on every one of these that says 'ripe tonight,' basically that this is perfectly ripe; it's ready to eat tonight." This was already true; it's just that consumers didn't understand this. So, they put stickers on every avocado, and suddenly avocado sales started to boom. Once you try it, you like it, but people weren't trying it because they thought it had gone bad. Instead, they said, "This is ripe, ready to eat tonight." That was the second thing they did. The third thing was that they needed to educate people that a green avocado was actually a bad avocado and that this was a good avocado. They did all this marketing to make it work, which you never really think about with fruit. You don't think about fruit marketing, but everything around us is the product of some ad guy trying to boost sales. Once you realize that, you can learn two things: you can learn a lot about marketing, and you can learn a lot about how the products that you see are not as they appear. You become a little more skeptical, a little more jaded towards all products when you realize that even avocados were basically like, you know, they were just someone's dropshipper somewhere who had a great idea.

Sam Parr

Dude, first of all, this is awesome! This is very interesting. We should do an entire episode on fruit and marketing. It's actually really interesting. Planet Money had a podcast on the Honeycrisp apple. You know, it's the most popular.

Shaan Puri

Right.

Sam Parr

You know, before a lot of apples like that existed, it was Red Delicious. It's kind of fascinating.

Shaan Puri

I met a guy who had done a venture-backed startup. He raised a bunch of money and was trying to grow the business, but it blew up. We checked in with him and were like, "Yo, what are you thinking for what's next?" I thought he was going to say some AI stuff or some crazy big idea. Instead, he said, "I'm trying to invent a new fruit." I was like, "What?" And he goes, "Yeah, you ever had a mango?" I said, "Oh yeah." He replied, "You think you've had a mango? Wait till you try my mango." I was like, "I'd love to try your mango. Send it!"

Trailer

To me.

Shaan Puri

He sent it to me and basically, he was saying that the shape of the fruit really matters. For example, the ease of eating. He had these mangoes that were in like circular spheres, basically little balls. His little mango balls were ready to eat. They were super juicy, and the texture was perfect. I was like, "Wow, this is genuinely an amazing mango experience. Thank you for this!"

Sam Parr

What's it called?

Shaan Puri

Well, he kind of pivoted off that because he's like, "The logistics of it are so hard." He's like, "To get fresh [produce], it tastes really great when it's fresh, but just the logistics to get this to customers is so hard. I would have to go about this in this way, this way, this way." So, he pivoted off that idea in the end. But, fortunately, I got to try that mango.

Sam Parr

And the crazy part is, and this is actually kind of an interesting note, is that it takes 10 or 15 years to do. Imagine if you're building a website and you could only make a change once a year to that website. You would see the results and be like, "Ah, shit, that didn't work. Next year, let's see." Because you have to wait for it all to grow, it takes a long time. So we should do a whole thing that is patentable.

Shaan Puri

Right, like, you know, I guess there are some rules around patents. The rules that I read were basically like this: if you want to do a fruit plant patent, it has to reproduce asexually. It has to be created by breeding or grafting. It cannot be discovered if it's already in the wild; it can't be patented. There are a bunch of rules like that. So, you know, the first fruit plant patent was by this guy, Henry, who planted the climbing ever-blooming rose. He created that rose and patented that plant, and then he gets to benefit from that. So, I think when we do our fruit and plant episode, we need to go find like the greatest fruitpreneurs to ever live.

Sam Parr

Yeah, we... I just looked him up on Twitter. I have had some interactions with him. You know what's funny about Twitter is that there are so many people. I remember I was talking to this woman named Shelby Church. They're like YouTube celebrities; they'll have 5 or 10 million subscribers on YouTube. Then you go to Twitter and they've got 10,000 followers. On Twitter, they're just trying to learn like the rest of us to get business insight and things like that. This guy is not that popular on Twitter, but he's got 10 million across all of his other socials. We could just DM him and get him on here. That's kind of cool.

Shaan Puri

Yes, let's do it.

Sam Parr

I would love that.

Shaan Puri

So, I'm going to show you something here. I made a video of Camp MFM that I want to share. Originally, by the way, this is my debut of vlogging. You'll notice that the video is not a vlog. Why? Because your boy sucks at vlogging.

Sam Parr

It's hard.

Trailer

I learned that.

Sam Parr

It's really hard.

Shaan Puri

I learned that the hard way. He'd be like, "Alright, so I'll just get a shot of you walking into the house." And I'm like, "I just walk into the house." He's like, "No, no, no, you can't just walk in." I was like, "What do you mean?" He's like, "You gotta say something and then you gotta walk in kind of an interesting way." I was like, "I don't walk interesting or say that. I just walk into places. There's no one here to talk to. What am I supposed to say?" Anyways, it didn't work out so well, but we have a cool video we are playing for the Rolex. Let's go! This is Camp MFM, the once-a-year retreat I host with MrBeast, where we get 20 entrepreneurs for three days living in one house together.

Sam Parr

Man, there's a lot of good.

Trailer

Not as much good. He's facing some championship, yeah.

Sam Parr

Coos and the team have to do a cold plunge in the pond. Yeah, they go down and scream into the blue. I thought the buzzer went off.

Shaan Puri

Really deep breaths.

Trailer

Oh, alright. Hey Brett, go fuck it! Wow, straight to the top, never going down. Don't wait for the drop, never stand still to stop.

Sam Parr

I'm gonna give.

Shaan Puri

A super chill.

Sam Parr

Had a great time and can't wait for next year.

Shaan Puri

Alright, so two things. Number one: If you're just listening to the audio version, you gotta go to YouTube to see it. We're not even going to put that in the audio version because it's not going to make sense. So, go to the YouTube video if you want to actually see the video. Sam, I have three questions for you.

Sam Parr

What do they search? What do they search?

Shaan Puri

Oh, they search "My First Million," or you could just search "the greatest podcast of all time." Either one should show up if Google is doing their job right. If you search "My First Million," click on this episode, and you'll see the video here. So, Sam, I have three questions for you. Number one: How much FOMO are you feeling right now knowing that you skipped this year's Camp MFM? In fact, we may need to not even name it Camp MFM, just name it Camp Shawn because you didn't show up.

Sam Parr

I could not skip it. I had a newborn child, and I was committed to being with her for a certain period of time. I just couldn't go.

Shaan Puri

But it was a hilarious moment when we were there. Everyone was like, "Dude, where's Sam?" I was like, "He can't come. He just had a baby." Then everyone was like, "Oh yeah, yeah, yeah," and nodding. Then one guy goes, "Wasn't that two and a half months ago?" and then we were all like, "Yeah."

Trailer

What the hell? I didn't... I haven't even thought about it.

Shaan Puri

Bro, you can totally go for 2 days, and it's 2 and a half months in. So then we all laughed at you and then moved on.

Sam Parr

It was two and a half months ago, but I committed to three months. I had to stick with it. So that's one... what's two?

Shaan Puri

What do you think of my non-vlog video? What could we have done better?

Sam Parr

So, I wrote this down to let you know: I don't think you could have any of that music on there. I think it's going to get taken down.

Trailer

No, I think it's gonna...

Shaan Puri

Be fine. Connor Price, you... that's Connor Price's song. He was going to attend the camp. That's fine.

Sam Parr

The first song was Dropkick Murphys.

Shaan Puri

The first song is fine, and it's going to be absolutely fine. Nothing's going to get taken down.

Sam Parr

This isn't like a "oh, I just gotta ask for a mission" type of thing. It literally won't... like, the algorithm's gonna prevent this from going live. So, I think you have to change that song. But it's great! I thought it was great, yeah.

Shaan Puri

Okay, Narc. The third question for you: Have you noticed this trend? Part of this is me just showing you a vacation photo album, basically. But the other part is noticing that I think you started a movement, dude. I think I just messed around and started a movement. I didn't mean to do this.

Sam Parr

Did you just invent vlogging?

Shaan Puri

No, not the vlogging. This movement is about these kinds of like "man camp" active conferences. I don't know, I don't have a good name for it. I'm thinking it could be something like a "man business camp" type of thing. So, I did this camp called MFM, and then I started noticing other people who heard the podcast saying, "Oh, you know what would be cool? Like Sean did it for basketball, let's do it for something else." Now, I have a few of these that have started. My boy Danny Miranda has like a running club type of thing.

Sam Parr

Yeah, dude, I see them out there all the time. There's like 50 of them.

Shaan Puri

Looks like a blast! Pat Walls from Starter Story was like, "Hey, what if we did this for tennis, pickleball, whatever?" And they called it the MRR Open, like the Month of Revenue Open. Great name!

Sam Parr

That's a great name.

Shaan Puri

Better than our name! This guy in Hampton messaged me and he goes, "Hey, heard about Camp FM. So, so awesome! Had the same idea." This guy, Victor, who's like, "I'm gonna do this for poker." So he did a poker getaway weekend, rented a house, invited a bunch of people, and they just played poker all weekend. I think this is the new wave of getting together. You can either just get together for drinks, but guess what? The cool kids don't drink anymore. Everyone's sober as a salad.

Sam Parr

Dude, isn't it insane? Did you see Whole Foods announce their most popular beer that they sell? Do you know what it is? It's Athletic Brewing Company, a non-alcoholic beer. Yeah, a non-alcoholic beer is the top-selling beer right now in Whole Foods. Is that insane? No one drinks.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, no one drinks anymore. So what are we going to do? Get together and just, you know, suck our thumbs? This is not going to work. The next thing is, nobody wants to just sit at a conference or, you know, like a lecture hall and just listen to speakers. It's kind of boring. You want to weave it in with these things. So I think this kind of active conference thing is cool. I think more people should make these. You can invite me; I would love to know about them and then politely pass, just because I don't like to leave the house that much. But I think more people should do these, and I'm hoping that I get credit for starting this movement. I know people are going to go out and say, "No, no, this has been going on forever," but that was the past. I'm the present and future, and I just needed to tell you that I think.

Sam Parr

It's awesome! I want to go to the next one, and I'm going to make it a big deal out of it because I do have FOMO after seeing that video. Good job with vlogging! Not only does it...

Shaan Puri

If you're giving birth next year, when it's happening, you better be there.

Sam Parr

It dude, vlogging sucks. By the way, dude, Mr. Beast made fun of you in that video. Was he giving you guys a hard time for having a camera there?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, because I showed in, you know, with a camera following me basically. The funny part is, that was the first time I've ever done a vlog, as evidenced by the fact that at the end I was like, "That vlog kind of sucks. Let's just make a video out of it." But it was really fun actually having a guy there. Our buddy Max came and he did a great job.

Sam Parr

It's really embarrassing. I see a lot of people vlogging and walking around, and they have a guy following them with a camera. It's quite embarrassing; it draws a lot of attention to you.

Trailer

**I find it to be very, very humiliating.**

Shaan Puri

The upside is you might get famous; the downside is you're immediately humiliated.

Sam Parr

Alright, let me tell you about something.

Shaan Puri

Yeah.

Sam Parr

I'm going to talk a little bit about the best business in the world. Now, this business, Chamath, who I think is coming on the pod, actually has said it's the singular best business model in monopoly ever created. This should be easy for you to guess, right?

Shaan Puri

Ritz crackers? No, it's got to be Google.

Sam Parr

And so, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about Google and search engine stuff because I've been interested in this for years. I've been interested in DuckDuckGo, which I called that shot. I think I missed it; I thought it was going to grow a lot faster than it actually has, but it's slowly coming about.

Trailer

This is by the...

Shaan Puri

This is going to be the episode where we take credit for things that we had absolutely no part in. In fact, we didn't call the shots and kind of doubted it early on.

Sam Parr

It's like, "Hey, do you like making right-hand turns on a red light?"

Shaan Puri

I invented that. I was doing that when I was 16. Yes, I created it. Permit.

Sam Parr

I created it. I created that. So the reason... let me tell you why I've been interested in it: type 4 athletic fitting dress pants.

Shaan Puri

Hey, the autocomplete didn't even have any idea what I was doing there. That's not a common search.

Sam Parr

**Thick boy pants**

Trailer

Yeah.

Sam Parr

Alright, I was searching for this the other day and I had to scroll down so far to get to a website. If you look through the first results, it's like tons and tons of images. Is that what you see?

Shaan Puri

So, I see tons of images. I see a whole shopping carousel. Then, I see a couple of ads. After that, I scroll down and I see Amazon. Okay, yeah, go ahead.

Sam Parr

So, you gotta scroll down a ton to get to a website. It's actually quite annoying. Google has been pissing me off. When you just talked about how they have gone through some stuff and you still believe in the company, I'm slowly starting to lose faith in them. Their search has been really bad, and it's starting to frustrate me. So, I've been looking for all their other alternatives.

Shaan Puri

Did you Google for that? Did you just Google search for alternatives?

Trailer

Yeah.

Shaan Puri

I mean.

Sam Parr

It's like... even though I hate it, I use it. You know, it's like an abusive lover. But I was doing some research on when they first started. Google began in the late nineties. The founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, created a paper called "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine." Riveting, riveting stuff.

Shaan Puri

But please take our "Power Writing" course. Larry Page, that title is awful.

Sam Parr

And in that paper, they talk about what they think is possible with a search engine. They kind of started from an academic point of view, which is pretty cool to see, like their predictions. There's this one line that says, "In general, it could be argued from the consumer's point of view, the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want." Then he goes on to say, "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users."

Shaan Puri

So, like, 30 years later, they just went back and edited it and they're like...

Trailer

Nah, yeah, yeah, yeah... like.

Sam Parr

The subtext on their subheadline is just "psych." They said, "For this reason, as well as for this reason, we expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and won't be aligned with the consumer's needs." They actually go on to say that they think a subscription service search engine is the answer. Of course, that is the opposite of what they have eventually become. You know, Google is a $1.5 trillion market cap company, and 95% of its revenues come from search. It's the greatest business model of all time. I don't know how many people work at Google exactly; I think it's over 100,000. But I would imagine that you could basically fire everyone but about 1,000 people, and the company would just thrive. It would be the most profitable company in the world. The tricky part about Google—well, I guess it's good for them but bad for us—is that their moat is quite simple. The more people who use the search engine, the better it understands which results to give you. So, it's just going to get better, or supposedly better and better, making it harder for a new person to create an alternative. Now, ultimately, I think actually OpenAI is going to be an alternative. Gartner had this report where they said by 2026, they think Google search is going to be reduced by 25% because of AI. But I found a new alternative that just launched publicly a few days ago, or about a month ago. They've been around quietly, but they had a big launch party the other day, and it's kind of cool. It's called... I actually don't know how to pronounce it. It's Kagi. Yeah, sorry.

Shaan Puri

To a good start.

Trailer

Off to a... I mean, how do...

Sam Parr

You say this word "K A G."

Shaan Puri

Yes, Kagi.

Sam Parr

Kagi... Kagi. Yeah, I don't know, but it's got an interesting premise. So, it was started by this guy named Vladimir, and the premise is that there are **zero ads** and it's **$5 to $10 a month** for a subscription. I think that's an interesting premise, but I don't think that would work that well. However, this guy's story is pretty interesting. He started bootstrapping this business in **2018** and slowly started making progress. At this point, he's got about **30,000 people** who pay for it. If you go to [kagi.com/stats](http://kagi.com/stats), he reveals all of his stats. You can see the number of paid members, how many searches are happening per day... all of his stuff is pretty transparent, and I love when people do that. It's so fascinating to see. The reason he had this big launch recently is that they just raised **$800,000**. Very stupidly, it looks like they're spending that **$800,000** to buy **20,000 t-shirts** to send to their **30,000 members**.

Trailer

so so

Sam Parr

Vlad... Vlad has some questionable judgment when it comes to finances. Really? Yeah, yeah. So they blog about the business. If you go to their blog at blog.kaggi.com, they share everything that's going on in the company. They’re actually pretty transparent. In the blog, he mentioned, "Yeah, we're going to be sending out 20,000 t-shirts." I was doing the math and thought, "Oh, that's like $800." So, that's questionable. But he has this whole manifesto online, and it's pretty fascinating. This is the type of entrepreneur I really like because he has this blog and his personal website. He says, "I'm dedicating the work."

Shaan Puri

By the way, be honest. When you found out the founder's name was Vladimir, you were pretty biased to like this thing, right?

Sam Parr

I'm in.

Shaan Puri

You can add an extra million to that valuation if your name is Vladimir. Yeah, I'm in general agreement, and I have no arguments with that.

Sam Parr

Yeah, he's born in Yugoslavia and he had all these little indie hacker projects for a long time. He worked at GoDaddy, so he's a very technical guy. He seems very savvy. He was a VP of Product at GoDaddy and had another company called ManageWP, which was a web application that helps users manage WordPress sites. That got to a couple million in revenue, so he has some experience. He has this blog where he says, "I'm dedicating this work on Kagi to my three chill children while I try to make the web a more humane and friendlier place for them." I restarted reading that and I'm like, "Okay, I'm really fascinated by this guy. I'm very interested." On his blog, they talk all about the company and how it's working. He has all these great lines about how paying for search engines is unusual, but that's the only choice if you want to build an independent search engine that isn't ad-supported. You could do donations, but I don't think that's going to work. Five billion people use a search engine, and 99% of people are never going to pay. The thing is, the tiny minority of people who think differently—the 1% that will pay—is still quite a large number. That's 50 million people. He talks about how 20 years of ad-supported search have created resistance to the idea of paid search. However, a lot of people are already coming to the realization that the predicament they found themselves in with ad-supported search is not good for them.

Sam Parr

Through all this, I think I agree with this guy. The issue is that I don't think he's going to win. I agree with all of his points about subscriptions, and I'm on board with that. OpenAI is really good for that. But I'm very fascinated with guys that are going after Google at the moment. There have been a few: there was you.com, which I don't think is that intriguing, and there was neeva.com (that's N-E-E-V-A). There are a few others as well. This is a type of idea that, if you told me you were going to launch this, most people's reaction, including mine, would be, "There's not a chance you're ever going to beat Google." However, when you start thinking about it, I find it really interesting. I want to know your opinion on these people trying to build these search engines. Do you actually think that any of them will work, other than OpenAI?

Shaan Puri

Well, I think I agree with you on pretty much all fronts. Google search, over time, has become more and more about ads. You search for something, and you get an ad. The top half of the page is ads, and that's what you get. I think in Kaji's website, it says that if you just take Google's revenue and divide it by the number of users, on average, they make about $300 a year off of each customer. I believe it's around $277, which breaks down to about $23 a month. That's what you're worth to Google. So, what this guy is doing is basically saying, "Hey, instead of Google making $23 a month off you, you pay us $10 a month, and we'll have no ads." I agree with you that the big threat to Google is obviously the AI-driven engines. Google is trying to become that themselves. Whether it's ChatGPT, Google, Bing, or some new one that we haven't heard of, like Perplexity, that is the big thing: a better experience. They're trying to win with a better experience. Then you have DuckDuckGo, which is basically saying, "We are the anti-Google." Kaji is in that same bucket; they're the anti-anti. I would say DuckDuckGo is a surprising success given the amount of traffic they have. We did a whole segment on them a few episodes ago, looking at the traffic numbers and how stunning they were. What I think is cool about Kaji is that it doesn't need to beat Google. This is just like, "I'm going to build this. I'm a cockroach; I'm going to build this business, and you can't kill me because I'm going to be supported by my customers." Right now, it sounds like he's probably making around $2 to $3 million a year in revenue.

Trailer

I

Sam Parr

I think it's closer to 1 to 1.5.

Shaan Puri

Subscription revenue. He's making, well, let's say $1,500,000 in revenue. He's probably able to run the thing breakeven or profitably at that rate. You know, he'll just keep crawling. Next year, he'll be at 40,000 members, and then the following year, he'll be at 60,000 members or whatever. He'll just keep growing. And he's not even worth it. It's not worth killing if you're Google; it's too small to matter. He doesn't have to become huge. I think what he's saying is, "My mission is for people that believe in this." He says the 1% who would pay. I don't think it's 1%; I think it's more like 0.1% that would pay. Here's your option. Now the question is, how good is this? For example, you're into this. Did you sign up? Hey, are you using this now instead of Google? It's so hard to send this out instead of Google because they're the default everywhere.

Sam Parr

Yeah, and basically my frustration with Google is borderline to the point where I'm like, "Alright, I'm out." But the thing is, I'm like so...

Shaan Puri

6 or 7 more times, Google, and I am out of here.

Sam Parr

The issue is, I've logged in with everything, like on Chrome.

Shaan Puri

You know.

Sam Parr

What I mean is, "Shit, I gotta type in all these passwords. This sucks."

Shaan Puri

But I mean, I definitely... you know, ChatGPT has taken away at least 30% of my Google time, which is a pretty insane number, actually.

Sam Parr

And I, we're going to have to do an entire episode on **Sergei Brin** and **Larry Page**. These guys are crazy fascinating. I was reading a little bit about them when I was researching how Google started, and they were like huge... *well, let's just say they weren't the best people*. Sergei Brin, dude, they were... *not great*.

Shaan Puri

Have to explain that one to me.

Sam Parr

So, Sergey Brin, he had his resume online, and in the code, he put... If you inspect the source code of his website, you'll find Brin's hidden objective laid out bare, which is, and this is in quotes, "I want a large office, good pay, very little work, frequent expense account trips to exotic lands would be a huge plus."

Shaan Puri

Is that real? That's insane.

Sam Parr

That's on you. You could go to the website right now and find it.

Shaan Puri

You would never expect somebody whose innermost goal is a big office, no work, and expense accounts to create *fucking* Google.

Sam Parr

Yeah, and it's funny how opposites attract. There are stories about Larry Page where he was just kind of blunt and didn't totally understand normal human emotions. Larry and Sergey took pride in the fact that they would argue with each other. They would call each other stupid, saying things like, "Your idea is so stupid! That's dumb! Why are you..." and they would fight and fight. Then, one person would win, and the other would concede, saying, "Oh, your idea is better." They would bond over that. They would tell all the other employees, "That's what you all need to do." Unfortunately, when you're at like 50, 100, or 300 people, most people aren't like that. There are these crazy stories, like how a janitor, when they take out the trash, often leaves an empty bag at the bottom of the trash can in case someone else wants to take it out. Larry saw this and thought, "That's the most efficient way I've ever seen anyone clean! That is brilliant!" He made a whole memo about how the janitor does that and how brilliant it is. He said, "Why can't you guys be like this? In fact, everyone in the office needs to be like this." He laid out these eight rules, such as: "If you think your idea is right, go straight to the person in charge and tell them exactly what you think. Don't hold back." Or, "If you are working on a project and you are not providing value, leave that project right away and let the doers do what they need to do. Just get them coffee and serve them." He would say all these things that are very logical, and they do make sense. Unfortunately, this whole thing called human emotion kind of gets in the way, so it's probably not practical when you have 500 employees. But there are all these stories about how these guys would behave, and it's very fascinating. They were quite difficult when they first started. I think Google right now is going through this.

Sam Parr

Where their CEO... I kinda think it sucks, to be honest. I think they're gonna come back, but right now I'm not bullish on Google. I think they're gonna be around for a whole, a real long time because they're so big. But I'm eager to see something come and kinda crush them.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, well, I think the funny thing about all these "crush them" type of ideas is that when a company is really successful, it's like a giant castle with a huge moat. Everybody who tries to siege the castle faces the casualties of the world. They're basically trying to cross that moat and take over the castle, but it's too hard. The castle's too big, too strong, and the moat's too wide, etc. What ends up happening is that the thing that beats that castle is not somebody who comes and takes their land. It's somebody who just walks over like two miles and is like, "Hey, this is actually fertile land over here that everybody's ignoring." They build a new castle over there. Actually, the thing that diminishes the castle is that the original castle is just no longer as relevant. The world and the attention have moved to the new plants that everybody wants, which grow on this other land over here. Nobody took your thing, but you became less relevant in the world.

Sam Parr

No one wants that thing anymore.

Shaan Puri

Microsoft didn't defeat IBM by beating them at their own game. They realized that the game was actually software and operating systems. Then, the companies that challenged the Microsoft monopoly—like Google, Amazon, and Facebook—said, "Okay, cool, you can keep the operating system; we'll take the internet." Microsoft missed the internet. The internet was the place to be. Even when the internet became the focus, the companies that thrived on mobile were the ones that said, "Yeah, you can have that desktop app. We're going to create new mobile companies like Uber, Instagram, and WhatsApp." These companies outpaced the growth of Facebook. Now, AI and crypto are here. These are the new frontiers. The big projects being built in these areas are competing in a different game altogether. What often happens is that a company like Google becomes less relevant. You might ask, "Why do I need search?" The answer is simple: AI can do it for you. Why would I search for links when I can just get the answer directly? Even better, I might just need an AI agent that looks at what I'm doing and performs tasks for me. I don't even have to search for an answer; it knows the answer and does the task. That's where this is going. Whoever can achieve that will be the next Google, without even creating a new search engine.

Sam Parr

Right, and that's 9 out of 10 times how big innovative things come about. It's like, you know, all these people are trying to make the world's fastest car. They're trying to make a V6, turn it into a V8, and then we're going to turn it into a V10. They're going to put more cylinders in, more horsepower. And then you're like, "Oh, this electric car just went way faster. It has 0 cylinders." You know what I mean? That's exactly how it works.

Shaan Puri

Did I tell you about my boss, whose boss was Larry Page? He didn't tell me many stories, but he told me one. I came in once and I was presenting my goal. I said, "Yeah, our goal is to do, you know, 9.1 this year." Well, I don't remember what the metric was, like 9,100,000 users or something like that. He said, "You know what Larry Page used to say when I would present a goal? It's like, 'I'm gonna do 9 of something.'" He would just say, "That's a wuss goal. If you could do 9, you could do 10. Never set a goal at 9." I was like, "What?" And he said, "I just said what I said. If you could do 9, you can do 10. Saying 9 is just a wussy way to go about things." I was like, "He told you that?" He said, "Yeah, he would tell everybody that." So I stole that and I made the change. Now in my companies, I do the same thing. If anybody ever comes to me and says, "Yeah, we're gonna do 4.5," I say, "No, you're gonna do 5." If they say, "Yeah, we're gonna do 9.2," I say, "No, no, no, you're gonna do 10." If you're gonna get 9.2, you can get to 10. Trust me.

Sam Parr

It's like when 5'10" guys lie and they say they're 5'11". It's like, "Dog, just say 6'1". Be the real thing.

Trailer

What's your name, man? Yeah.

Sam Parr

Act as if, my friend. Act as if. Alright, that's the pot.