Profitable SAAS Business, Snapchat vs Facebook & Instagram, & HumanIPO | My First million 06/11/2020
Real Estate, Koch Brothers, and Snapchat Minis - June 20, 2020 (almost 5 years ago) • 48:51
Transcript:
| Start Time | Speaker | Text |
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Shaan Puri |
I know the Koch brothers. I saw you putting this in the Facebook group, that you were sort of summarizing what you had learned. What is the TL;DR?
All I know is Koch brothers: super rich, old white guys that I think support, you know, the conservative party. So what do I need [to know]?
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Sam Parr | to know besides that | |
Shaan Puri | sam what's up | |
Sam Parr |
Hey, I'm looking at an email that I just got from Milk Bar. They have a peanut butter and jelly birthday cake. My birthday is in a few days... if anyone is thinking about me...
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Shaan Puri | alright if someone's thinking about you what should they do | |
Sam Parr | just buy me that cake | |
Shaan Puri | what is milk bar is this a brand of cake | |
Sam Parr |
Yeah, it started because... What's that guy in New York? Chang? Mike? What's his name? **David Chang**. David Chang, he started the Momofuku bars, and they decided to open up a dessert area. Now that's spun off to its own thing called **Milk Bar**, and they make trendy cakes. I ordered one the other day. It's pretty good.
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Shaan Puri | How long does it take for it to get to you? A week?
Oh man, see that's the problem. I'm never thoughtful a week in advance. I'm like, the day of, "I'm gonna do something," but I need something that can get done that day.
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Sam Parr | it looks delicious can we talk about austin | |
Shaan Puri | yeah you're in austin | |
Sam Parr |
Okay, I've been in Austin for 3 weeks now. I'm gonna come home on Saturday. Austin is lovely; it is a great place. Sean is like, "Is everyone in San Francisco gonna leave?"
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Shaan Puri | no everyone in san francisco is not gonna leave | |
Sam Parr | I'm looking at but definitely | |
Shaan Puri | some some people are leaving | |
Sam Parr |
I'm looking at... So I have a place in San Francisco. I pay like $5,000 a month or something, $4,000 to $5,000 a month, and I live in... it's like a 1,000 or 1,100 square feet with a garage. [Now] I'm living in a place that's probably $3,000 a month and it's like a 2,000 square foot house with a backyard and like furnished. I'm like, "What am I doing?"
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Shaan Puri |
Yeah, but the thing is, you can go even further with that because... when I grew up, I lived in a whole bunch of different countries. I lived in Indonesia, I lived in China, and there it's like, you know, go to Indonesia and you'll live like a king. You can go live in Bali on the beach with a cook and a driver for the same amount you're paying in Austin, right?
So there's this kind of arbitrage of cost of living. It really never ends, so be careful.
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Sam Parr |
Yeah, I'm just... it's making me question my life. I look on Zillow all the time for buying a home in San Francisco, and the prices are dropping like crazy. It's like a $150,000-$200,000 cut off of everything. Are you gonna have the cut on your house?
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Shaan Puri | Hopefully not. If you're the buyer listening to this, I'm not taking one penny less than the asking price. That's my position. | |
Sam Parr | oh do you have someone who's gonna buy it now | |
Shaan Puri | no no I don't know I'm not I haven't listed it yet but soon | |
Sam Parr | good and so your friends do you have a lot of friends leaving san francisco | |
Shaan Puri | I have friends who were already in the process of it this just kind of accelerated | |
Sam Parr | some people just lifestyle | |
Shaan Puri | Wise, ready to go. Some people, when they're like, "Well, if I'm not working from home and commuting, I don't need to be here." So, yeah, definitely this has accelerated people out.
But it also feels like things are opening back up. I think that, you know, things can change. People can feel differently as soon as life gets a little bit back to normal. You never know what people will feel like, so we'll see as things open up.
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Sam Parr | I'm very eager so you wanna stop you wanna talk about some interesting stuff | |
Shaan Puri | yeah you got one | |
Sam Parr | Yeah, I got one. So, I know I try to get past media, but I just love it so much.
Okay, so Jeff Bezos, the Amazon guy, he owns The Washington Post. A few years ago, he said, "You know, I'm gonna buy it and I'll let the editorial do its thing and whatever else. I'm gonna stay out of it." But I kinda wanna take your guys' [The Washington Post's] technology to publish their articles. I kinda wanna take that and make it a huge business.
A lot of people try this and it very rarely works, but what he did was—or he didn't do it, but he was somehow part of it—they created this thing called Arc Publishing. It does a couple of things. The first thing is companies like me pay money to use it.
But it's really interesting because you and I have talked about this idea. What Arc Publishing is doing is they're going to companies like BP, the oil company that has 200,000 employees, and they are saying, "Hey BP, you have 200,000 employees. We're gonna help you publish newsletters and articles to your employees, which you already are doing, but we're gonna help you organize it and make sure it's read."
They're saying that in the next year or two, they're gonna hit $100 million in revenue.
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Shaan Puri | wow | |
Sam Parr | Which means I bet the Washington Post probably does maybe $500,000,000 in total revenue, but $100,000,000 in this enterprise SaaS revenue would be worth more than the Washington Post itself.
I wanted to get your opinion on this:
A) That's a cool idea that you and I have been noodling with for a while, and they're executing it in a really interesting way.
B) The idea of branching out from your main thing to do something totally unrelated. In some ways, it's totally a stupid idea. I mean, there’s an argument to be made that this is just a stupid idea—never do it.
However, there's also an argument to be made that a lot of people do it successfully. So, what's your take on this?
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Shaan Puri | So first, this... I've never heard of Arc. This is my first time hearing about it. Just to clarify, they give other brands or companies the tools that the Washington Post uses. So they sort of productize their own toolkit.
But is it always like the use case you talked about? Like BP, which has 50,000 employees, wants to publish internally, or is it also for external publishing?
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Sam Parr | I think that they're still trying to figure it out. I believe that they're building it for a variety of reasons. At first, it was just for publishers. Then, they closed this deal with BP, and I think to them, they're like, "Maybe that's the way, that's the path."
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Shaan Puri | Right, no, I think there's something to that. Because, you know, when I started the podcast, I used to go to this podcast studio before you guys built a dope studio in your office. I was going to this kind of rent-a-studio-by-the-hour place.
I was talking to the guy who ran it, and he mentioned that they had a sports radio station, a 24/7 sports radio station. Then they thought, "Well, we know how to build a studio; we built one for them. What if we turned a few conference rooms into broadcasting booths?" And we did! We offered it to podcasters. These hipsters in San Francisco, they love this stuff. And so, they didn't say that.
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Sam Parr | and by the way in san francisco there there there are no studios | |
Shaan Puri | they they're basically the only one and trust | |
Sam Parr | me I tried | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, so I went there and I was like, "Hey, can I get 11 AM tomorrow?" He was like, "No, we're booked up from 11 to 3." I'm like, "Shit, who else are the podcasters using this?"
He was like, "Oh, this is Facebook." I was like, "Facebook?" And he's like, "Yeah, they have an internal podcast that they do for their employees."
Because Facebook has, I don't know, tens of thousands of employees—maybe 50,000. I don't know. But they have managers who come in and record a podcast about managing at Facebook, and it gets distributed only internally.
I was like, "I'd never heard of an internal-only podcast that a company was doing." But of course, you know, it makes sense. People want to put out content, training, you know, different things like that, whether it's in text or audio form.
That was my first time hearing about these internal publishing systems that I had never really considered. | |
Sam Parr | And that is what Arc is trying to do.
Like Facebook, which has tens of thousands of employees—around 20,000 or so—they need to create a lot of this stuff. For example, they need to communicate: "Hey everyone, here’s how we’re addressing this situation. Here’s what we’re going to say. Here are the words we’re using," and so on.
They also need to explain if they’re quitting a product and why, as well as how to use the internal software.
I think it’s a great idea. You and I had discussed a slight variation of this, but I want the listeners to tweet at me and tell me.
I always hate the idea when people say, "Oh, I can’t do this; it already exists." But I just want to know: Does this exist? Who is solving this problem?
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Shaan Puri | Put okay, we've talked about a few variations of this, so let's go over them. This is all in the bubble of the theme of what I'll call... I mean, I want to say **internal publishing** because that sounds lame as shit, but basically, it's intra-company stuff. I'll think of a good name in a second.
But basically, we talked about Q&A, or sorry, all-hands software. You know, big companies do all-hands meetings for their whole employee base. Also, individual divisions will do all-hands for their group. What you need there is video streaming. You need chat or Q&A functionality, but it needs to be private. It needs to be internal; it needs to be behind a wall that nobody else can get to.
A lot of people already have video streaming services out there, but that's for mass audiences, you know? It's like YouTube, it's Twitch—things to go get a big audience. But this is for a select audience; it's a little bit different.
So we talked about that one. We talked about when we were going over Hemingway and how it makes you a better writer. We were saying, "What if you could do this for internal emails inside a company?" But also just a **Mailchimp** for your company.
So how does somebody get the word out within a company? How do they make nicely formatted, easy-to-read company announcements and bulletins that come with the kind of tools that Mailchimp has, like tracking opens and clicks and that sort of thing?
So that's internal Mailchimp, internal podcasting. What these guys are doing is basically internal **Washington Post**, which is like a whole bunch of different features and functionality. They have broadcasting, like live streaming; they have blogging; they have...
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Sam Parr | are you reading the the website right now | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, I'm going through their products. They have a huge set of things—basically everything you would need to make a Washington Post.
I think that's just an interesting thing to think about: what if you took the best-in-class products that people use to publish and broadcast to large audiences, and you asked how companies need this just for internal broadcasting and internal announcements?
I remember my brother-in-law, who owns gyms—he owns like 50 gyms—and he was like, "Yeah dude, I just need an easy way to mass text all my employees on a text list the kind of numbers for the day and any key announcements about what we're trying to do."
He's like, "You'd be surprised, it's really hard to get this stuff set up and make this a part of the onboarding of my company so that everybody knows they should join."
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Sam Parr | That's the SMB version, like the small business version, which is also a good idea.
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Shaan Puri | And then the second thing you talked about is, you know, when do you take your eye off your core business? How do you expand into other lines of business? I think that's generically a hard thing, and it's a case-by-case situation.
You have plenty of examples where it worked, and it becomes a huge business unit. Let's call AWS the best example of this, where Amazon takes its own sort of server and compute system and services system and makes it available to any company. Now, AWS brings in, you know, tens of billions of dollars a year.
So that's like the best-case scenario. Then you have probably, you know, hundreds of thousands of other examples that you could come up with where somebody does this, and it doesn't take off. It becomes a distraction, etcetera, etcetera.
And you guys have considered this too, so how do you think about this?
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Sam Parr | Yeah, so when we consider it, everyone says the same thing. They go, "Well, Amazon did it. Let's just make AWS for them." I'm like, well, you have to understand that Amazon did it like 10 years into the business when they were 10,000 employees. Throwing 250 people at that problem is... ain't no thing.
At my company, it's like, yeah, okay, I could hire a person. I have no problem hiring a couple of people to do it, but you do need to get your main thing right first. That said, I struggle with it because I have ADD and I want to do this stuff, so it's hard.
I don't know, like Twitch. I bet Twitch is in the same boat. They're big enough that they can have these same projects, and a lot of the infrastructure that they probably are built on, I bet they had to make a lot of it from scratch. So, I don't know. | |
Shaan Puri | So, Twitch is 10 years into the business, and you're right; they invented essentially the best-in-class, let's say, live video streaming at scale. You can have 100,000 people all watching one channel with low latency, and it doesn't fall over while broadcasting around the world. Nobody else really had that problem, so nobody else built a solution.
You could imagine that Twitch could say, "Hey, we could make this available to others," and that they could spin it out as its own business unit. I think that might be a good decision, right? Because you're taking an asset you already have, one that you've refined, that's sort of battle-tested and brandable. Your sales pitch is, "Hey, we use this for the biggest live streaming network out there."
But at the same time, it's a distraction. They wouldn't have done it in year one, two, or three. They could do it at year ten because at that point, your core is stable. It's not going anywhere; it's not gonna die.
I always make these analogies, and I don't know if my team really likes it, but I always talk about how a startup is like a baby. With a baby, they just need to eat, sleep, and poop. Nothing else matters. You don't need to teach a baby calculus right now; you don't need to do all this other stuff.
But as it becomes a teenager or gets ready to go off to college, you don't have to watch it so intently. You don't have to worry about keeping the baby alive every single day. That's the main objective in the early stage. But as you get to the later stage, you don't have to worry about that, which lets you...
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Sam Parr | invest in the they like that's a good analogy why don't they like it | |
Shaan Puri | I think it's because I'm always like, "Right now, we just gotta keep the baby alive." It's sort of a darker way of talking about it, but I did this with one of our companies in Idealab.
We had one company that was already mature; it was already profitable, making $1,000,000. Then we had this other project that was totally unproven. So, anytime you had to decide where to spend an hour, it always seemed like a good idea to spend it on the thing that's making $1,000,000 in profit, never on the super speculative thing.
But if we did that, we would have never invested in the new thing. So, I made a decision. I said, "Hey, we can't have the baby and the teenager in the same room because they have totally different needs. They need a different type of care."
You know, one will always look feeble and weak compared to the other, but that one that's feeble and weak today has the most growth potential. So, we need to be investing in that too. Let's split these two companies up and let's spin them out.
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Sam Parr | What about you? Do you think that you are like me, where you have ADD and you like starting stuff? Or are you the opposite, where you like to run it?
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Shaan Puri | I have ADD in the sense that I'm attracted to doing new things. I'm attracted to new strategies and new ideas.
But the second part of your question was, "Do you like to run it or not run it?" Of course, in my ideal world, I wouldn't have to run it. Someone else would run it, take the idea to fruition, and I would get to own the whole thing.
But in reality, I found that this is much harder to implement. It doesn't mean it's impossible, but it's much harder to implement.
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Sam Parr | Yeah, this is an interesting discussion. I was reading about Coke, Coke Land, and the Koch brothers. You know what that is?
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Shaan Puri |
I know the Koch brothers. I saw you putting this in the Facebook group, that you were sort of summarizing what you had learned. What is the TL;DR?
All I know is Koch brothers: super rich, old white guys that I think support, you know, the conservative party. So what do I need [to know]?
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Sam Parr | To know, besides that, everything you've just said is a stereotype about them that 99% of people think is true. The reason I wanted to read the book about them was that it was just interesting.
What I learned is they're far richer than that—not in terms of money, but they're much richer in character. They kind of get pegged as these old white guys who control the conservative party. In reality, they're quite libertarian, and they actually give money to all types of charities.
I mean, they give a lot of money to gay rights organizations because one of the brothers is gay. They also give a lot of money to prison reform because they believe the criminal justice system is screwed up. They're very principled, and it just so happens that the Republicans definitely do a lot of the stuff that they want to give money to. But they go across the board there.
The way they got started was that their father started an oil company, which was somewhat successful—making $30 million a year in profit in today's dollars. So, it was very successful. The 31-year-old brother, Charles, took it over when the father died and turned it into the largest privately owned business in America. He took something that did $30 million a year in profit to now probably like $10 billion a year in profit.
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Shaan Puri | he got out of oil what what did they do with yeah | |
Sam Parr | So, what they did was take their $30,000,000. They owned an oil refinery and did a combination of things.
The thing about oil is that it goes through this tower where oil turns into gasoline. Then, the leftover stuff turns into kerosene, and then the leftover stuff turns into Vaseline. After that, the leftover stuff turns into propane. They just started selling all the leftover products and took those profits to buy different companies.
For example, they make Bounty paper towels and a lot of the paper that newspapers are printed on. They also produce a material called Gore-Tex, which is used in various products. Additionally, they make a strong plastic material that Nike uses to make shoes, which is called Lupran.
So, they just create products that originally started as oil, but now it has expanded. Their operations are basically about starting or buying a ton of stuff, and it all started with one thing. That's kind of one of the reasons why I'm interested in this topic.
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Shaan Puri | I like that a lot. That was just a great description, and it totally changes my perspective. It kind of expands the stereotype I had of the Koch brothers in my head. You know, I never bothered to sort of look under the hood and be like, "What is this? How did they get rich? Are they really just the sort of evil manipulators of the conservative party?" Or is there more depth to it? So that's kind of interesting, I know.
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Sam Parr | Well, I'm not saying that they're evil. I don't think they are evil. I think that they do some things that a lot of people, particularly liberal people, strongly disagree with. But it might be you... I don't think they're evil.
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Shaan Puri | I told you about my friend. My friend who I'm like, "This guy's gonna be a billionaire." He's like 22 years old, and I'm convinced he's going to be a billionaire someday.
He interviewed with the Koch brothers to be their head of investments or something like that. He was pretty far down the interview process. I asked him, "Dude, do you feel a certain type of way that it's the Koch brothers or whatever?" He just laughed and said, "Is money green? Okay, money's green. Thank you, that's all I care about."
He's so ruthless about the way he looks at these things; I find it hilarious. Ultimately, he didn't take the job because either A) they didn't offer enough, or B) I think they're based out of Kansas or Nebraska or something like that.
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Sam Parr | that wichita kansas | |
Shaan Puri | Wichita. He was like, "Yeah, I don't know if I want to go live in Wichita for X number of years to do this." So, he ultimately pulled it up.
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Sam Parr | well if he got offered and he didn't take it he's an idiot but I'm sure he'll figure out his way | |
Shaan Puri | Okay, that's pretty interesting. I like the... anything else on the Koch brothers? Otherwise, I like that. I would say that's the "Billy of the week" then in this case.
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Sam Parr | That's yeah, I'll finish it up with, I'm reading *Coke Land*. It’s a book that clearly tries to be negative about them, but it's still a great read.
Then there's *Sons of Wichita*, which is their biography and tries to be objective.
There's another book called... it's either called *Good Profit* or *Market-Based Management*. It describes the Koch brothers' management philosophy, and it's incredibly interesting. | |
Shaan Puri | Nice! Okay, I like that.
Yeah, I just started reading a lot more recently, and it's like the best decision I made. It sounds stupid, and it's not even worth talking about, but the reality is there are probably a lot of people like me who enjoy reading but go through these phases where they intensely read and then don’t read anything for two years. If you're that person, just do it! Go back to reading; it's great. I just did it, and I don't regret it at all.
I'm reading this book called *The Happy Body*, which is really interesting. It's about these guys who study weight lifters. They basically ask, "What should you strive for with fitness?" They conclude that you should aim for these three or four things. You don’t want to be a bodybuilder who is just strong but slow and inflexible. You also don’t want to be a baby who is super flexible but weak. You want to be... well, they start to outline it.
There are all these little tests, so I'm always doing them and making my wife do them too. I'm like, "Okay, stand against the wall. Raise your hands above your head, and I'm going to count the points of contact against the wall." Okay, here's how you are in terms of your body alignment or posture or whatever it is.
So, there are all these little tests, which makes it a lot more fun to read.
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Sam Parr | I'm gonna buy this are you doing this because you feel like you're getting old | |
Shaan Puri | I'm doing it because it came recommended. I think somebody said, "This is a great book."
The other thing is, I basically believe that everything that's the sort of common knowledge about food and fitness is just so... confusing.
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Sam Parr | and | |
Shaan Puri | Bullshit... and it contradicts itself so frequently that I'm looking for better source material. I don't want someone to sell me a fad diet or a new program, like P90X.
This book reads almost like a textbook, and I find that a lot more appealing because I don't feel like I'm being sold to some program or diet products and stuff like that. So that's why I'm...
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Sam Parr | I'm buying it I'm getting it I'm gonna read it and we will have a little | |
Shaan Puri | I got two ideas for you that are both based on Zoom. Actually, I have a better idea. Let me go to the better idea first.
Okay, so did you see today that Snapchat had their developer conference thing?
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Sam Parr | yeah tell me about that thing that they | |
Shaan Puri | So, they introduced us to a few things. They were like, "Hey, you know, last time we introduced games, and games are doing great." They were just kind of hyping up games to get more people to build mini-games on Snapchat.
But they introduced other things called **Minis**, and I think Minis is actually a bigger move by them. Minis are basically mini applications built into Snapchat. What they're doing is copying WeChat, which is the big messaging app in China. WeChat has like a million little apps built in. For example, if you need to pay your bills, you just do it through WeChat.
How do you do that? Well, there's this little mini website that the utility company makes that will just pop up in your WeChat, and you hit pay, and it's done. Or if you want to buy movie tickets together, you do it within WeChat. We don't do that in iMessage or Facebook Messenger, but that's what all these companies would love to do. They'd love to be WeChat here in the States.
So, Snapchat's taking a big stab at doing that. They announced several of these Minis. For example, one of the Minis is **Headspace**, so you can do a quick meditation with one of your friends from Snapchat. They also did a movie ticket buying feature, among others.
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Sam Parr | what's the stock app | |
Shaan Puri | I don't know how the stock's going, but what's interesting here is that Snapchat is sort of in a position where they have to become a platform to compete.
Facebook and Instagram have sort of just declared, "We will steal your mojo." They took your mojo already, and if you come out with some new great mojo, guess what? You know, Evan Spiegel, you're the head of product at Facebook. Actually, whatever you come up with, we are going to put in our apps as soon as humanly possible.
So their only strategy... they have basically two core strategies. One is maybe they can create Snap glasses, these AR glasses, and they can just sort of get off the cell phone game and get into the glasses game before anybody else. So that would be like a...
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Sam Parr | what's it called a a snap mini website what do you call that | |
Shaan Puri | They call them **Snap Minis**. What they are is little mini websites that can pop up and serve as utility tools inside Snapchat, besides just messaging each other.
Now, the second thing is becoming a platform. Facebook and Instagram don't do a great job of letting other companies build on top of them. People distrust those companies. They've built apps on top of Facebook and Messenger before and gotten screwed. So, they don't have great ecosystems.
Snapchat is kind of pushing their chips into the middle of the table and saying, "Come build on us. We'll treat you better than those guys will." And you kind of believe it. You kind of believe it because it's really their only way to compete with Facebook and Instagram. So, they have to actually honor this.
Anyways, just a quick idea. In general, I think that being early to these platforms...
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Sam Parr | and these app | |
Shaan Puri | App ecosystems are a good thing. There have been several Snap Kit apps that have been like number one and number two on the App Store. So, they've gotten a **ton** of distribution from it. | |
Sam Parr | what's a snapkit | |
Shaan Puri | App Snapkit is basically the toolset that Snapchat gives you to build stuff. So it's like, okay, Snapkit will say, "You want to access their Bitmoji? Cool!" Snapkit lets you just type one line and you get their Bitmoji character. You can do stuff with Snapkit; it lets you use their Bitmoji camera with all their lenses. | |
Sam Parr | I'm doing this course with Goggins, and a lot of the things we talk about are **inflections**. So, what are inflections?
There are a variety of styles of inflections. For example, there's **technology inflections**, which is basically like, "Oh my God, the internet is now in everyone's house." That is an inflection; there's an opportunity there.
Then there's **belief inflections**, such as, "Wow, people really don't trust the media. What can we build to help?" Or, "People are afraid to be in groups of thousands of people. How can we fix that?"
What we are seeing right now is a **technology inflection** or a **platform inflection**.
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Shaan Puri | inflection yes | |
Sam Parr | And this is it. This is like when Pandora, the music company, Tim told me that the company was around for 3 years and it was doing horrible. He said they heard about the Apple Store. For some reason, Steve Jobs reached out to them and said, "You guys might be a good place to put your stuff here." Once that happened, he was... and this, I don't know if it will be, but this is potentially one of those.
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Shaan Puri | Yeah, these are asymmetric bets. Sure, maybe most of the time these platforms either don't work out or there's nothing cool to build, and you'll waste, you know, a month of your time. Or you might catch a wave early and get to the top.
For example, the very first episode of this whole podcast chain is with Sooey. Sooey talks about how he was working at Microsoft and realized he wanted to quit and start a company. He quits and moves back home with his parents for about two weeks. In the first two weeks, he's kind of bored.
Then, the day he quit, Facebook held their developer conference and announced, "Hey, we're making the Facebook platform. Anyone can build an app on Facebook now." So he goes home and thinks, "Alright, I don't know if this is going to be a business. I don't think so, but I just need to start programming again to get the rust off."
He builds a Facebook app that was, well, kind of silly. It was like a superlative app asking, "Which of your friends is most likely to end up in jail?" Boom! It goes viral. He ends up with tens of millions of users, and that changes the trajectory of his life. Silicon Valley starts calling him, and Naval flies him out to San Francisco and wants to invest in him and stuff like that.
So he took a bet on the very day the platform launched. If I'm a bored developer today or someone who has the ability to code, I would be building something on top of Snapchat. The challenge is that when you want to build something, you need to get the user to leave Snapchat and come to your app. So you have to create something where the whole experience is on Snapchat and does not compete with what Snapchat does.
Here's the idea... | |
Sam Parr | okay yeah sure | |
Shaan Puri | I call it **Cameokit**. So basically, I think you could build the app **Cameo** on top of Snapchat.
Cameokit would just say, "Cool, I wanna buy a Snapchat from one of these celebrities, and I'll pay you right here through Snapchat." Then, I wanna send it either to myself or to my friend on my Snapchat list.
So basically, imagine it's your birthday coming up, right? When's your birthday? It's in a few days.
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Sam Parr | yeah you actually bought me a cameo you had gilbert godfoy call me a dickhead | |
Shaan Puri | Right, so I did that last year, but this year I could do it through Cameo, a little new invention of mine.
So basically, I would go into Snapchat, open it up, and see a list of influencers that have Snapchat, which is like every celebrity in the world. I would request a video and pay right there. Then, you would receive a Snapchat from either me or from them in your inbox.
The whole Cameo experience could be built on top of Snapchat without having to have separate websites or separate apps, all that stuff. You could compete with Cameo very quickly.
So I think that's a very simple idea that could monetize on top of Snapchat.
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Sam Parr | What else? What are other ideas I can monetize? I think that you—I'm sure a lot of people have spotted this—but you're the one who told me about it, so I'll attribute the genius to you. I think that's a great idea. This is a good spot by you.
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Shaan Puri | what else which which one that that one just now | |
Sam Parr | Yeah, so besides Cameo, Kit is a cool idea. So...
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Shaan Puri | okay so here here here's another one so here's an idea | |
Sam Parr | Well, what you said about paying your bills is great. Like your utilities and roommate stuff.
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Shaan Puri | Right, yeah, paying your rent is an easy one because younger people who split rent could use Snapchat or Snapcash to just do it. That's kind of interesting. I don't know exactly how much that's integrated, but that could be a problem that you solve.
I think if you're a food delivery company, you should probably get on this. One of the little fun things I've been doing for another birthday thing, instead of cameos, is that someone on my birthday just sent me food via Postmates because they know where I live. They just ordered me food, and it showed up at my door. It just said, "This is from this person," and I was like, "Oh, that was great!" That's like a $20 gift that is awesome and took them no effort.
So that's my new hack: I just send people Postmates just for fun as gifts. I think you could do something like that.
But here's another one: I saw a company called Moonshot. It's a very fun company idea. What they did was they were like, "Hey, everybody's working from home, which is cool and convenient in some ways, but the one thing you really miss is the sort of camaraderie and interaction with your coworkers."
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Sam Parr | And what can I tell the readers or listeners, and me, what can I Google to find that? Because I just searched "moonshot" and I don't see it.
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Shaan Puri | Search "Moonshot Escape Room." So, what Moonshot is, it's a virtual escape room that happens over Zoom.
It costs, I think, around **$300** to do the experience, but it's great. You know, as a team-building activity, that cost is nothing. Companies will easily pay for that for groups of **10 to 12** employees to get together and do something fun.
I do escape rooms all the time with my team. I think it's a really fun way to go out and do something. This experience is done entirely through Zoom; they built the whole experience digitally.
I'm like, "Oh, this is really smart," because escape rooms are actually pretty good businesses in general. But this takes out the one biggest cost of escape rooms, which is the rent and the person you need to facilitate the whole escape room. Doing this on top of Zoom is a really smart idea, in my opinion.
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Sam Parr | This is great. I don't know if that could ever be huge, but it could be good. I'm looking at it now. It's... who? What’s the reason? Is that the company who owns it?
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Shaan Puri | I have no idea | |
Sam Parr | how did you find this | |
Shaan Puri | This was on Product Hunt, and then it got shared. Because, again, this was sort of remarkable; people hadn't seen something like this. So, people started sharing it, and it went kind of viral.
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Sam Parr | yeah okay it it's I've been doing it | |
Shaan Puri | So, here's another one. In the last three months that we've been sheltered in place, how many Zoom birthdays have you attended?
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Sam Parr | none have you | |
Shaan Puri | none what oh my god I've had to do 5 of these things including my own | |
Sam Parr | Dude, I'm always... Oh my God, Sean! Did I miss your birthday? When was it?
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Shaan Puri | my birthday's back in april but but basically | |
Sam Parr | oh wait I didn't give you anything I'm sorry | |
Shaan Puri | Oh, it's all good. Don't worry about it.
But in fact, I usually hate my birthday because I hate... you know, believe it or not, even though I have a podcast and I plaster my face everywhere in the cover art, I actually hate when the attention is on me. It's like this forced fun thing.
So, I was actually happy to skip my birthday. But over this quarantine, I've been to so many Zoom birthday parties because people can't celebrate through, you know, the normal means. Now, I don't think this is going to last very long.
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Sam Parr | you just have more friends than I do | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, well, you know, that's what I do. But I don't know, I don't think this will last very long. However, if you could find some way to do celebrations over Zoom, if you could find a way to make... | |
Sam Parr | I have one coworker who's getting married on Saturday. They're streaming the wedding on Twitch. Oh, nice!
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Shaan Puri |
Okay, that's pretty good. Yeah, so I don't know how long some of these last. I think the Cameo on top of Snapchat and the escape room over Zoom, I think that's more here to stay. I don't think the birthday stuff will last very long, but I like the idea of building stuff on top of Zoom and on top of Snapchat. Especially now that people are celebrating occasions and looking for ways to socialize remotely.
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Sam Parr |
I would do rent payment. Easy. No, that's the first thing I would focus on. Great idea, that's a good one.
"You want to do 1 or 2 more?"
"Sure."
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Shaan Puri | you you got one or you want me to do a different one | |
Sam Parr | Yeah, I had one. Let me... oh wait, no, I already... I kind of like, I did the Coke family and the Arc Publishing kind of at one. It kind of fell into each other. Did we talk... did we do a recap of Death? What's his name? Liquid Death?
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Shaan Puri | we did not do a recap no yeah what do you think about that | |
Sam Parr | Okay, so two weeks ago, or ten days ago, we had this guy named Mike. He started Liquid Death; it's bottled water. I had a lot of people message us about canned water and say they think that the water was bad.
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Shaan Puri | yeah yeah | |
Sam Parr | I think the idea is kind of cool. I like him a lot. I think that guy's a winner. It's a winner. | |
Shaan Puri | I think he's a winner too. I went into the meeting thinking, "This idea is kind of dumb." We had talked about it before, and it seemed kind of dumb. However, I came out of it thinking, "Maybe I should hit this guy up to see if I can invest in this company."
The reason why is that sometimes it really is that simple. He's taking a mass product like bottled water or canned water. Water is, you know, the definition of a mass consumption product.
The second thing is, if you just do anything different in the water space and it latches on with any small percentage of that population, you're going to have a meaningful business. I think he's doing something very different compared to how the other brands are approaching it.
I really do think this is going to be a successful company, especially once I met the guy. I was like, "Oh, this guy's a winner." He understands what this is and what it isn't, and that makes sense to me.
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Sam Parr | Yeah, I would like to see how he operates. He's the type of guy who I would be a little bit nervous around. I would want to get to know him more because he seems like a guy that is a little reckless, and that could be both good and bad. | |
Shaan Puri | And that's a good call because he was talking about the previous company he built, the brandy company. I think he's a great starter. He saw the opportunity, he started it, and he has a vision for the brand and what the culture wants.
Now, in terms of the blocking and tackling that it takes to just operate for like seven years straight, he’s probably not the best in that other company. He was kind of vague about it; he said, "I parted ways with those guys. It's all on good terms, you know? I still have my shares."
But basically, it was like, "Okay, thanks for the creativity, bud. We'll take it from here." It seemed like it was kind of that. I could totally see that happening again with Liquid Death.
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Sam Parr | A person I admire once wrote that being artistic is the exact opposite of making money. Basically, artists and capitalists are opposites. I haven't decided if I fully agree with that, but I tend to say I'm closer to agreeing with it than not.
I think artists are the opposite, and that doesn't mean they're good or bad. You know, I think a lot of art... who gives a fuck about the money? It's great because it's interesting. I don't care if it's expensive.
Sometimes, when people are artistic, I think, "Okay, you're cool." However, I don't think that you can make a profit and loss statement to run a company that has to make and save money.
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Shaan Puri | Right, yeah. I think that's probably true. If you have an extreme strength in one area, you probably don't have the extreme strength in the exact opposite sort of skill set area.
What I hope for is that you have to be just good enough to be dangerous in the other area. So, like, okay, you're super creative and you can build brands. Do you have just enough of the operational know-how and discipline to execute on this?
You know, Sofia Amoruso, when she was on, she was clearly a great brand builder. She did it with Nasty Gal and I think with Girlboss—that was what it was called, yeah, Girlboss.
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Sam Parr | well she's a marketer she's definitely a marketer | |
Shaan Puri | And she... I think it's a little more than marketing. It is marketing, but I guess it's about identifying what's in the soul of the customer and then being able to build a product or brand that taps into that.
I think she was doing a great job of that. I think this guy Mike is doing a great job of that, you know, with Nasty Gal. She didn't manage the other side of it, and the train went off the cliff.
You have to know enough about that, or you have to hire people that complement it in that way. If anybody wants to read something about this, I just read a blog post called "Pioneers, Settlers, and Town Planners" or something like that.
It basically talks about how, in any given company, you have three types of people. You have the pioneers who want to breach new land. They want to be the first ones there and live off of what they can hunt or kill. Then you have the settlers who follow in right after and start to set up the very basic systems for life to continue. They're not just looking for the next thing like the pioneers are.
Finally, you have the town planners who can organize large-scale systems. None of these roles are good or bad, or cool and not cool. It's just a matter of knowing who you are or where you're at as a company.
Then, you need to make sure you have the right type of person leading based on what's needed. If you need innovation, you need a pioneer. If you need operations, you need more of a town planner.
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Sam Parr | Coincidentally, I read an article today called "Managers: The Difference Between Managing and Leading."
The idea was that people who are leaders thrive in chaos. They are very comfortable with ambiguity, and that's important. On the other hand, people who are managers focus on creating something sustainable that can operate effectively each and every day.
I'm for sure a leader, not a manager. So, I actually read something like that today, and I think we're similar.
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Shaan Puri | Yeah, right, right on. Okay, a couple of other quick things that are kind of interesting. I want to get your opinion on this. Just give me a "dumb" or "awesome."
The website's called **humanip0.app**. These guys are doing a very fancy branding around an old idea. So, what it does is I can go public as a human IPO. I'm Sean, and I get a stock ticker, which is like, you know, SHA or whatever.
I can basically IPO off a share of my time. I can auction off up to 500 hours of my time that you can book from me at a certain price. If people think, "Hey, you know, this Sean guy, he's on the way up. His time is going to be more valuable in the future," they can buy a unit of this guy's time.
They can either hold it and trade it later at a higher price, or they can use it to book an hour of my time. So, this is the core idea.
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Sam Parr | I'm on the website now it's incredibly interesting | |
Shaan Puri | tell tell me what you think of it | |
Sam Parr | For sure, it's interesting, innovative, and wild. Whoever invented this is a nerd, and I fucking love those types of people. Logistically, I just don't think it makes sense because, well, I can buy Brian's time.
So, I'm looking at the site now, and I don't understand why they call it like that. They're really just rebranding expert networks and consulting. It's just like, dude, just let me take some time for...
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Shaan Puri | I don't know what they clarity fm | |
Sam Parr | It's the same thing. Definitely cool, but highly unlikely to work.
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Shaan Puri | right | |
Sam Parr | That's what I think. I think this is like an art project. That's neat! I don't know, how did you find this?
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Shaan Puri | I saw it on, I think, Product Hunt, and I was like, "Yeah, I've been following..." I think I talked about this in one of the previous discussions. I've been following these personal ICOs, personal coins that people are creating in the crypto world.
This is not crypto, but it's the same idea, and I think it sort of has the same pros and cons. I think it's kind of exciting in a way to bet on people, but I also think it's kind of lame. Like, what do I get? I get an hour of their time? Like, well...
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Sam Parr | No, on this, you have like this guy I just clicked on. You have to buy 100 hours of his time at $250 an hour. So what does that mean? Is it $25 or $250? Or is it $250?
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Shaan Puri | I didn't I didn't hear exactly what you said but you | |
Sam Parr | have to buy a 100 hours from him at $250 so that's $25 | |
Shaan Puri | $25 yeah | |
Sam Parr | So, but like, I don't think... if I was this guy and I just sold 100 hours of my time, I have a feeling that I would bail on a lot of that.
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Shaan Puri | Yeah, so one piece is: are you actually going to fulfill?
The second is, what am I doing? It's basically like a freelancer selling blocks of design time, programming time, consulting hours, or whatever it is.
Okay, that's cool. Maybe for really special, unique people, that works. I don't think this is that interesting overall.
The ones I think are more interesting are the ones where you actually get a piece of their earnings over the next few years.
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Sam Parr | would never do that in a 1000000 years | |
Shaan Puri | I know, but some people would say, "Cool, I'll take..." You know, it's like people who raise money for their company, right? They're selling off future earnings for capital today.
Some people might want, instead of doing it for your company, to do it for yourself. So I think it's interesting. I want to see somebody like...
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Sam Parr | I'm gonna sign up for this | |
Shaan Puri | figure out the use case | |
Sam Parr | I'm gonna... I wanna. But do you know these guys? Can you introduce me? Can I be one of these people that can sell 100 hours? That seems interesting. Just from an innovation perspective, it's so weird and interesting. I would love to try this.
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Shaan Puri | I like it. Cool. Okay, so that was the last one I wanted to do. Do you have any other stuff you want to go over? Is there anything else on this list that interests you? I could talk about any of this stuff.
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Sam Parr | Yes, but I don't want to talk about it today on here. You have "What is Happiness?" and I want to learn all about that. I also want to learn about hype, which I think I know what it is, but I kind of want to save it because the happiness thing was interesting to me.
That happy book—I have it pulled up on my Amazon. I am going to probably read that whole book in the next 2 or 3 days. That is interesting, and I'll tell you why. I'm obsessed with my posture right now because I've gotten strong and fit over the last 3 months, and that's wonderful.
But I have scoliosis. My posture is horrible, and it's making me nervous because I'm like, "What's the point of getting strong if I'm crooked and not healthy?" I've looked all over the place for good scoliosis workout routines. I'm like, "Man, I just want something—just like a posture doctor," right? And it's kind of interesting. A posture doctor is kind of cool to me.
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Shaan Puri | I was... yeah, I thought about that. I went for a run the other day and I was like, "I think I don't know how to run." I think nobody taught me how to run.
Then I started running a certain way and I got out of shape. I think I just run like shit. I know I don't swim the right way either. There's a better, more efficient way to swim as well.
I'm like, "I need to clean all these up." I want to clean up my running, my walking cadence, or whatever you call it, and then also my swimming.
But yeah, I'm similarly obsessed with these things. And you know, you've been getting jacked, which I think... you know, props to you for doing that. Every time you send me one of these videos... you know, Sam sends me these videos that are like, it's not nudes, but it's definitely more than what it's like—more than friends, less than lovers. We're somewhere in between there.
And yeah, he sends me the video and you've been getting jacked. It's kind of amazing. So, props to you for actually doing it.
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Sam Parr | It's been a big change. I basically don't know if I do a diet; I just eat meat and only green vegetables. I don't eat breakfast, and I move every single day. I don't know, it's been easy, but it has been awesome.
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Shaan Puri | amazing | |
Sam Parr | But you know, it sucks. It's just sitting in a chair; it totally messes you up. This is why I want like a body doctor, like a posture doctor. I just... I want to be more like a wild animal.
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Shaan Puri | In this book, *The Happy Body*, there's this picture of this inversion chair. I don't know if you've ever done one of them.
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Sam Parr | I have are they good | |
Shaan Puri | I've never done one, but when I saw it, I was like, "Well, here's the thing. I'm gonna have to buy this because I think I need to do this." I think I need to do it.
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Sam Parr | Did they say that inversion chairs are good? Yeah, I just hang. I have a bar, and I just hang from my bar.
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Shaan Puri | Yeah, but you need to go the other way. You need to hang from your legs so your back decompresses. That's what they basically say it's for: to decompress the spine. | |
Sam Parr | oh oh I'm gonna read this whole book | |
Shaan Puri | How long is it? I don't know, it's kind of long.
Alright, cool. Let's get out of here. Well, now we're just talking bullshit.
Cool, thanks for listening! Share this with your friends. You need to just go on your... if you have a Facebook page, or a Twitter, or an Instagram, you need to just screenshot our podcast and then say, "This is the best podcast I listen to," and just post that. You can tag me; that's also great. But even if you don't tag me, definitely post it.
If you're not going to post it, delete your Facebook, delete your Twitter, delete your Instagram because you're not using it right. That's what we need from you: go post it.
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Sam Parr | If you do it, we'll call this game "50/50." Do that and tag me and Sean, and you will either get a shirtless picture of me, Sean, or a third party.
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Shaan Puri | okay how could you resist alright excellent let's get out of here | |
Sam Parr | thank you | |
Shaan Puri | alright see | |
Sam Parr | you |