How To Make Millions By Pitching TV Shows To Netflix, Hulu And Apple (#358)

Shaan Puri

Alright, so what's going on? Basically, there's a streaming war happening. Netflix, Disney, Hulu—everybody's fighting for subscribers. Okay, well, how am I going to differentiate myself? If I'm Netflix, how do I stand out from Hulu and HBO and all this stuff? Basically, they need original content. This has created a huge imbalance. There used to be a lot of content and a small amount of distribution. Now, there's a lot of distribution fighting for a small amount of content. All the distribution players have just decided, "The prize is big, let's lose money for several years and invest $1,000,000,000 into content. Let's be the last person standing." So, they're investing on what you call a J-curve. The curve goes down; you lose a bunch of money, and then, like a J, it goes way up and you make money later. What that means for these production companies is they'll overpay. There is a bidding war, and they are willing to overpay for my content. Alright, in this episode, we are talking about the latest industry that I am totally, completely obsessed with. I almost can't think of anything else, and I'm not sure why other people aren't freaking out about this. So, I go on a rant about that. What else do we have?

Sam Parr

We talked about Mark Manson and how he's built this amazing empire from his book, *The Subtle Art of Not Giving an F*—I'll say "F" there. It started just as a blog post and turned into this incredible business that's making tens of millions of dollars for him. Then we also discussed production companies and how part of this job involves having to immediately snap out of a horrible mood. The bad part about this job is that you have to do that quickly. I can't exactly explain all the details about why I'm in a bad mood, but it basically involves a real estate deal that I did, and I feel like someone is trying to take advantage of me. Here's what I think happens—tell me if this happens to you. I feel like when I do a deal with someone, whether it's a small deal or a big deal, they learn about what our stupid podcast is named or they Google us. It's mostly the fact that the podcast has such a horrible name. Then, you know, you get the "local price" and then there's the "other guy price." I feel like I get the "other guy price," you know what I mean? Even if it's just a little discrepancy, it really pisses me off.

Shaan Puri

That's hilarious! Yeah, I don't think that happens to me. No one's ever referenced it. I've never gotten that feeling. In fact, I actually get a bunch of credit the other way. People are like, "Look, I don't want to offend you with a lowball offer on whatever it is. I know this money doesn't matter to you." And I'm like, "Dude, I'm showing up here. The money matters to me, right? Please don't not give me the money because you think it won't matter to me." Like, you know, I think it does. So, I think it cuts a little bit both ways. People say, "I hate the thing where it's just like, 'Dude, thank you so much for taking this. I know how busy you are.'" I'm like, "Dude, I just sit around in my box all day. I don't know what you think I'm doing, but my son just threw up on me like two hours ago. This is awesome compared to that!" So, what do you think my life is that is so busy and interesting? Because it's really not.

Sam Parr

Yeah, I... it is funny when people say that. I'm like, "Well, I am busy. I'm talking to people all day." But, like, I don't think you understand that talking is just like slacking back and forth and having conversations, right? I remember when we first started The Hustle. Basically, these producers—this happens all the time—they email tons of people who are even remotely interesting and they're like, "Hey, can we make a TV show about you?" Obviously, they didn't know what they were getting into. We weren't even remotely interesting enough. But I'm like, "You guys do realize we're just sitting in front of a computer all day, right?" It's like the most unfascinating, uninteresting thing. It's not interesting at all. But dude, I'm shocked you don't get like that... that other guy pricing it. Dude, you have a BMW, right? Is your house fancy, you think, or just normal? Normal nice.

Shaan Puri

my house is my house is not fancy

Sam Parr

My house isn't fancy either. Just like, I don't know, maybe when they see that I'm at home during the day, I don't know why, but I'm always nervous. I'm like, "Wait a minute, my neighbor's paying only $150 a month for their landscaping. Why am I being told $250?" You know what I mean? I feel like that stuff happens all the time.

Shaan Puri

The Time Podcast! Get your wallet out, boys. He's got a podcast!

Sam Parr

so whatever I'm past it I gotta move past it

Shaan Puri

That's so funny you said that thing about filming. By the way, I had that same idea back in the day at Monkey Inferno because we had this really nice office. I thought building startups was the coolest thing in the world, and I was like, "Why isn't there a documentary crew here?" You know, like "The Office," but I'm the cool Michael Scott, right? Like, I'm awesome. So, I had watched "Hard Knocks" on HBO, which basically makes NFL training camp look so epic. You start rooting for these stories and all that stuff. So, I was like...

Sam Parr

have like mics on the players and you hear like

Shaan Puri

hey get them get them

Sam Parr

Hey man, what are you doing? Like, you hear them talking, like the pads hitting? You know what I mean? It's good.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, but then it also extends. It's like, "What are you doing?" It's like, "Ah man, I'm just having a lot of trouble at home." And it's like, cue the music, and they cut to the backstory of what's going on at home. I was like, "Yeah, we got these stories, man. We're trying to make it in the rough and tumble world of social media." I thought we were cool, and then this filmmaker-type person came to the office. They're like, "Wow, incredible place! Quiet day."

Sam Parr

I was

Shaan Puri

Like, what do you mean, like a normal day? He's like, "Everyone's just sitting there with their headphones on, not talking to each other." I'm like, "Oh, that's what we do all day." He's like, "Well, what would we film?" And I was like, "Well, sometimes we have a meeting where we look at the numbers." I guess, yeah, I guess you're right, we're lame as hell. And so, yeah, that ended at that.

Sam Parr

It's so lame. It's always embarrassing when people, like, sometimes our address in the daily email was in our email and people would stop by. I'm like, "Yeah, so this is the one room that we sit down in. There's the bathroom on the left side."

Shaan Puri

or the right side do you wanna see what it looks like from this corner

Sam Parr

It's just like we sit here and don't talk sometimes for 3 hours at a time. There's music playing in the background every once in a while.

Shaan Puri

Your office was hilarious. It's like, why do the dogs sit in chairs and the people have to sit on the ground? I love dogs, but why? You know, what's going on here? Why is there only peanut butter in the kitchen?

Sam Parr

yeah dude I used to eat like a jar of peanut butter every 2 days that was my shtick

Shaan Puri

so then let me tell you this other interesting thing so I don't know if you remember this but there was a

Sam Parr

That's so funny! By the way, do you remember the peanut butter? I would eat so much peanut butter. We also used to have eating contests once a month as a fun thing because, like, we were idiots. We didn't have a lot of money to go and do a family or team-building activity, so we would just go and buy like 500 Burger King Chicken McNuggets because that's only about $50. We'd say, "The first person to eat 100 wins," which is a horrible idea for dozens of reasons. The first reason being, everyone gets sick afterward. It can't work. The second reason is that it's just stupid. The third reason is that no one can actually do it, and they just end up puking. We would also do a Krispy Kreme eating contest and a White Castle contest. It was the worst! I was an idiot.

Shaan Puri

Dude, I think these videos still exist online. When I was doing my very first startup straight out of college, it was like two buddies doing this stupid sushi restaurant thing. We were living in one apartment, you know? My buddy lived in my closet; my co-founder lived in my closet. We would basically buy air mattresses and return them every 90 days to Target because we were like, "Oh, you could just get your money back."

Sam Parr

suckers yeah

Shaan Puri

Yeah, idiots! We're totally living the high life with this. So basically, we were like, "I don't know why we were thinking this way." You know, the way to make a restaurant... a restaurant's not open yet, but what can we do that's like our scrappy mark? I don't know why we even thought this was remotely relevant. We said, "Let's get people invested in the journey of building this." To do that, let's create a YouTube channel. We called it "The Duel." It was me and my friend, and the opening clip is like a high noon standoff. We both walked 15 paces away, turned around, and looked at each other dramatically. The music's on, and then we would take a challenge from anybody who commented on the YouTube channel. We would do that thing. So it was like, "Oh, you're doing a sushi restaurant? Brush your teeth with wasabi as toothpaste for one minute." And so we did it! We did these really dumb things. You can see us in this apartment, in a really crappy, ugly-looking kitchen.

Sam Parr

and it was pretty big I mean you had literally dozens of subscribers

Shaan Puri

I remember one time I went out to a casino when my sister was in town. This guy goes, "You're the wasabi guy." My sister was like, "What? Are you famous?" I was like, "What? Am I famous?" It was like the first hint of what was to come. Fast forward 12 years, I created the podcast. But in that moment, I was like, "This feels nice. If I do dumb stuff, people will know me." Then it ends after that, or they let me go for this. All I tacked on later was, "And then I could sell cohort-based courses." You know, that became the end. But anyway, long story short, if you remember when Clubhouse was popping off, there was this group of people in college—people just graduating college or in college—that created that show, "Shoot Your Shot." Do you remember this?

Sam Parr

Yeah, it was popular—like really popular—for about 4 weeks. Basically, if I remember correctly, it was like 3 good-looking women. They would call up a guy, and the guy would hit on them, or would the girls make fun of the guy? I forget.

Shaan Puri

So, they created a room called "NYU Girls" on Clubhouse, which is already interesting because Clubhouse was just filled with SF dudes. You go from SF dudes to NYU girls; that's like a major shift. It's like walking into a room full of bears with a pocket full of honey. It was like, "Well, what's going on? There are interesting people on this app."

Sam Parr

Just imagine a bunch of good-looking Soho women who hang out with James Franco, write poetry, and, you know, don't wear bras.

Shaan Puri

like like that's

Sam Parr

like that's like stereotype oh nyu

Shaan Puri

There's not a... yeah, there's already no bras on Clubhouse, but now there are girls with no bras on Clubhouse, right? So, anyway, they created the show "Shoot Your Shot." It was basically to call up an awkward tech dude onto the stage, and he got to "shoot his shot." It was kind of like an ultra-budget version of "The Bachelor." He would come on here and spit game at one of these girls, and we would talk for 20 minutes. We could either boot him off or, if we liked him, he would be in the group. You kind of pass the rite of passage—it's a little dating show. It started organically, but it became the most popular show on Clubhouse, which was, you know, the small pond syndrome. You were the best thing in a small little growing pond. So, anyway...

Sam Parr

It was embarrassing. I listened to it and I was embarrassed. It wasn't bad, but I was like, "Oh, they're gonna make fun of him." I thought, "Oh, don't make fun of him," or "Don't say something stupid, guy, please." I was rooting for the man; I didn't want him to screw up.

Shaan Puri

You know, they would get out there and be like, "Hey, you know, my name is Akbar, and you know, typical SaaS guy." And they're like, "Sassy guy?" And he's like, "No, like SaaS, like B2B SaaS." But what are you saying? What are these words, Akbar? So anyway, do you know what they're doing now? So the fact that... the fact that...

Sam Parr

You said that phrase about them. I'm already on board, like, yeah. Yeah.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, that part... listening to this somewhere, he's like, "I could do it again." Yeah, that was like a highlight of my life. So, I met the main girl who was behind it. I think her name is Devin, and we did a Zoom call. You know, did you ever...?

Sam Parr

meet sue and she's like what's up nerd

Shaan Puri

Yes, and guess what? I loved it! Now, like, I did the Zoom call. You know when you meet the founder, and sometimes within 60 seconds you're like, "Alright, you're a star." So, you're a star—that's established. Now, I just gotta figure out: is this your dumb idea, your kind of dumb idea, or your good idea? Because you're going to go through probably all three. I just gotta figure out where you're at in life. Have you met founders that...?

Sam Parr

Are like this for sure. It's just like you're not there yet, but I still am interested in buying the stock and getting in. I think that's why a lot of people invested in me at The Hustle.

Shaan Puri

Same thing with me. Like, I'm like, "God, people gave us this idea for our sushi restaurant." You know, they were helping us and they really liked us. I thought that meant we had a good business idea. But actually, what was happening... now that I'm in that position, I'm like, "They're just like, oh, this guy's gonna do shit. I like this guy's mojo. This is his dumb idea." And like, you know, whatever. I'm on board to get to the good idea. I'd like to start this relationship now so that as he figures his stuff out, good things happen. That's how I felt about this girl.

Sam Parr

is she like an nyu woman like is she like that age

Shaan Puri

Yes, she was at NYU and then she graduated. Now she's shortly out of NYU and has raised $6,000,000 to build her show, **Mad Realities**. The old thing was called "NYU Girls Roast Tech Guys," which was great, and now it's called **Mad Realities**. They went into Web 3 and all that stuff. I don't know if you need to do that, but they basically gave NFTs out to the audience. The audience gets to vote; it's like *The Bachelor*, but the audience votes on what's going to happen in the show. So, it's a reality show where the viewers can help shape the show and engage with the plot in some way. Fans can vote them off or whatever. They created the show where you can be an NFT holder, or you're a rose holder. I think they've raised about 172 ETH, which at today's prices is like $250 in sales of their NFT. So, not huge, but not terrible either. The A+ firm in crypto, **Paradigm**, invested in it and led the round, I think.

Sam Parr

Is there a reputation to do anything that's decent, or are they selective?

Shaan Puri

Paradigm. They're a little mix of both. Like, they're the smart guys in the room, but I also think part of being the smart guy is that the smart guy starts to do weird and crazy stuff. Yeah, and you're like, "Are you sure this makes sense?" And they're like, "No, it doesn't, but that's why it makes the most sense." Like, alright, you know? Like, Founders Fund just invested in, like, I don't know, this plant that only causes you to hallucinate in a bad way. They're like, "Hallucinogens have a bad rap." And you're like, "Alright." They're like, "In 30 years, hallucinogens will be your morning cup of coffee." And you're like, "I don't think that's true, but you're so smart. You're good at chess and math, so I guess I'll just defer to you on everything in life." That's how I... you were... you were...

Sam Parr

at paypal in 2008 you know what you're doing you know

Shaan Puri

Like, your hobby is cryptography and you created PayPal. So, I guess I'll roll with you on this, like, you know, kombucha that you're investing in, even though it doesn't really seem like that big of an idea. So, anyway, that's kind of what I felt was going on here. Like, here are their investors: Paradigm led it, Paris Hilton, Packie McCormick, you know, like Scott Belsky, friend of the pod, our homie who's super smart. But I think, you know, when I met this woman, I was like, "Oh, there are a bunch of names I don't recognize," besides that, like, you know, probably, I don't know, EDM DJs or something, people I don't know.

Sam Parr

marvel maybe

Shaan Puri

Yeah, you have to leave your house to know these people and say, "I'm out." But I thought this was kind of interesting: to create a show. I've actually been... I don't think that this is so... Two things come to mind. One is, when you're a star, you're going to get funded to do some dumb stuff, and that's okay. I actually think it's a smart idea to back these star people because they're going to do amazing things in their life, as long as they just keep taking attempts.

Sam Parr

I

Shaan Puri

I think this is probably not her best idea, but yeah, three years from now, whatever she's building is probably going to be amazing.

Sam Parr

I'm on their site and I'm just skimming through their videos. I don't know, man. It seems like they're executing kind of well on maybe a dumb idea. It seems like a dumb idea, but my wife is a very smart, you know, techie woman, and she is obsessed with "The Bachelor" and "The Bachelorette." I don't even know what it is, but we have to have it in the house. I know it's on Tuesday at 8 o'clock. It's like on, and yeah...

Shaan Puri

Way to throw people off your trail there! Say the wrong date. Yeah, like you don't sit down every Monday with your glass of rosé with Sarah, and you guys don't watch this together, holding toes. I can't.

Sam Parr

That'd be weird. I can't stand it. All I know is this season, it's two women picking dudes, and I just don't like it at all. But I know that it's a huge deal. It's still like a huge deal, and my wife, Sarah, is talking to all of her friends about it consistently. So, like, I don't know, man. This is kind of a cool idea. It definitely does seem big. I actually do think that you and I... I don't know about you, but I don't know anything about the movie business, or Hollywood, or entertainment. I don't know anything about that. When people talk to me about a production company, I'm like, "What the heck is a production company?" I don't know what that is. But I do know that Reese Witherspoon owned one of those production companies, and it got acquired by Blackstone for like $500 million a few months ago. I also know that one of the richest Black men in America, I believe his name is Byron Allen. When I was reading about him on Wikipedia, I wanted to learn more about what this guy did. It was talking about his production company and all these shows that he made, and I'm like, "Damn, dude, whatever this is, it's actually much bigger and more organized than I ever even imagined."

Shaan Puri

So, it's funny you bring that up. I've actually been in the lab. It's not ready yet, but we're going to take it out for a spin right now. I've been learning about production companies, and I want to tell you kind of like... here's my... can I give you just a random rant?

Sam Parr

it's hard to understand right

Shaan Puri

Normally, I have to have a packaged take on it. That's what I like to be. But you brought it up, so let me give you the unpackaged, unfiltered, raw version.

Sam Parr

like where

Shaan Puri

Give me that cookie dough. So far, yeah, exactly. Hey, turn the oven down. We don't need it; we got a spoon in the dough.

Sam Parr

I want this content extra gooey

Shaan Puri

So, alright, what's going on? Basically, there's a streaming war happening. Netflix, Disney, Hulu—everybody's fighting for subscribers. Okay, well, how am I going to differentiate from Netflix? How do I differentiate from Hulu, HBO, and all this stuff? Basically, they need original content. This has created a huge imbalance. There used to be a lot of content and a small amount of distribution. Now, there's a lot of distribution fighting for a small amount of content. All the distribution players have just decided, "The prize is big, let's lose money for several years and invest $1,000,000,000 in content. Let's be the last person standing." They're investing on what you call a J-curve, where the curve goes down—you lose a bunch of money—and then, like a J, it goes way up and you make money later. What that means for these production companies is they'll overpay. There's a bidding war, and they're willing to overpay for my content. Just last year, basically, Reese Witherspoon, LeBron James, Will Smith, and Kevin Hart sold stakes in their production companies. For example, Kevin Hart has something called Heartbeat. He raised $100,000,000 from private equity for 15% of the company. Wow! That's a $650,000,000 valuation for Kevin Hart. Fifty percent of their revenue comes from the studio arm, which produces shows for Peacock, Netflix, and so on. They make movies and shows.

Sam Parr

They have writers on staff, or writers come to them with an idea. They say, "This is intriguing. We're going to pay money. We're going to pay $100,000 or $500,000. We're going to get some actors and a set. We're going to make 1 or 2 episodes of this. We're going to shop it around, and then someone will buy it, and we make a profit."

Shaan Puri

Exactly. So, I'm going to use a Hollywood term that I don't know how to use, but I'm going to just whip it out here. They "option" it. What does it mean when they option it? It's like, you know, they basically take an option on the future of this thing. They create a sizzle reel, or it was like a 2-minute teaser, or they create a pilot, or they create nothing. They just have the pitch and the concept. So, you're Kevin Hart. You walk into six studios and say, "It's a movie where me and a tall guy, you know, we're coworkers that don't like each other, but then we get trapped in an elevator." And they're like, "Love it! We'll take it." Then you're like, "How much does it need?" It's like, "We're going to need $100,000,000 to do this." Of that, you're going to pay the production company $1,000,000 to go produce this movie. There's some margin in that, and then, you know, whatever the revenue or the upside would be, we're going to have some split.

Sam Parr

and presumably can

Shaan Puri

I buy it. It also has other businesses that produce, so 50% comes from the studio arm. Well, what's the other 50%? It's a combination of other things like content licensing and brand consulting work for companies like P&G, Lyft, Sam's Club, stuff like that. So, I don't know what he's doing, but that's Kevin Hart's business.

Sam Parr

That's $1,000,000. The value here is presumably Kevin Hart and his team know about what type of content gets eyeballs and engagement. They presumably have connections with all the big players, and they have some money that they'll finance things upfront. They are curators and operators.

Shaan Puri

And they're the influencers. It's like, you know, everybody kind of knew, "Hey, if you go get an A-list star, you put Tom Cruise in the movie, more people are gonna watch." Well, what these guys have realized—LeBron, Reese Witherspoon, Kevin Hart, The Rock, who has his own production company—is, "Oh, let's just go vertically integrated." Let's not just be the talent that helps sell the tickets at the box office. Let's also be the production company that creates the content. What they don't do is the streaming platform part. They're like, "Okay, we'll partner on that, but we're gonna do these other components ourselves." So, they're also... you know, the big part isn't just that Kevin Hart knows what people want. It's like, one of the things people want is Kevin Hart. So he's like, "Cool, I'm gonna own a little more of my upside if I do this."

Sam Parr

And you know who crushes it this way? **Fucking Ryan Seacrest.** I was reading about Ryan Seacrest and *American Idol*, and this guy... that guy is a workhorse. He has a production company that kills it.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, you know, our buddy Pop Pop is like the Ryan Seacrest of the crypto industry, right? He's just everywhere. It's like, "Dude, you got a morning show, then an afternoon show, then you're producing this thing, and then at night you do this." Like, wow, your output is unmatched! That's Ryan Seacrest; his output is crazy. He's like doing...

Sam Parr

it for 20 years

Shaan Puri

I'm on the radio for 3 hours every morning for 20 years. Then I do this, I put on my suit, I host this, and I produce the Kardashian show. Yeah, and then he's like, "Then I go do American Idol." After American Idol, I go do this other thing. It's like, jeez man, like... blink, you know? What's going on?

Sam Parr

it is grandin' man see how

Shaan Puri

that big

Sam Parr

pulls it

Shaan Puri

Then there's Reese Witherspoon. She sold her company, which produced "The Morning Show," that big show on Apple TV+, and "Big Little Lies" for HBO. She sold that to Candle Media, which is basically a group of Disney executives who spun off into a company backed by Blackstone for about $1,000,000,000. So, she sold her entertainment company to them for $900,000,000. She creates shows around women; that's like her shtick, and she has generated quite a bit of success with it.

Sam Parr

She is awesome! I'm a big Reese Witherspoon fan. If Brad Pitt is in it, I go to it.

Shaan Puri

You called her Reese Witherspoon earlier, and I just thought that was a nice touch. I had never heard that rendition before. I liked your remix, so you know.

Sam Parr

I call her reese

Shaan Puri

Do you know how much money this just raised? You know how much money her thing made? No? $120,000,000 in 2021.

Sam Parr

in revenue or

Shaan Puri

Product, and then they expect revenue. They expected it to double to $310,000,000 in 2022. So, Blackstone paid roughly a 7x revenue of where they bought them. It's kind of crazy. They basically don't own any ownership; they make the show for the streaming service. And by the way, when they bought the company, she also has a book club that's like ridiculous. Do you know about her?

Sam Parr

Book club. Yeah, she also has a clothing brand. The clothing brand wasn't a part of it, but it's called Draper James or something like that. What's it called?

Shaan Puri

I don't even know dapper maybe

Sam Parr

Something like that. She has a book club. It's called "Hello Sunshine Book Club," is that what it's called?

Shaan Puri

I think it's just called **Reese's Book Club**, but it has 2,000,000 followers or members in it. I don't know, that's kind of a silly number. So what she does is promote her favorite books. Then, she goes to those authors and says, "Hey, I'm about to blow your book up, but also I want the option rights to make a show out of your book if I can take that." So she market tests the books with her book club, makes money there, and uses that leverage to get the rights to that book to make a show out of it. Then, she sells the show rights to the next...

Sam Parr

she's great man

Shaan Puri

She's great! Okay, you know, like a cutthroat media mogul or whatever. Innocent Reese is just like, "That's an amazing model." So yeah, I think that's kind of crazy. Also, she sold, I think, the data. So, you know, like the people who bought it, I think they get access to that membership of the book club and then the data around them—what they like and what they dislike.

Sam Parr

So, long story short, this Mad Realities thing... you kind of just did the pitch for them. I'm like, okay, the macro thing—that's, as an uneducated person, mildly interesting. That's an interesting story. You kind of sold it like this actually could be a huge thing. This could be as big as any other tech company, almost. So that's interesting. This young woman doesn't have, you know, the clout or connections likely that Reese or whoever has, but like...

Shaan Puri

she's got the charm

Sam Parr

I'd buy

Shaan Puri

it and and the hustle and I think if I was her so here's my brainstorm for her I think I might have told her this at some? But whatever I think if I was her I would not be trying to create this like stand alone show so I would immediately have been shopping this I would say hey here's the deal I can make you the next too hot to handle love island love is blind I'm gonna make one of these shows and what I would first do is I would build this I would build the audience on tiktok or snapchat so I would first go and sell it to the social platforms that also want original cool content for a small amount of money I'd say hey I'm gonna create cool dating I'm gonna create a dating show on top of tiktok what's that worth to you guys and they'll say oh like we'll give you 300,000 or a $1,000,000 out of our creator fund yeah because tiktok has I think a $200,000,000 creator fund right so I'd go to them and be like I'd go get a 1,000,000,000 and a half dollars to create the tiktok dating show and then I would just take that popularity and I would say hey netflix hey whoever we have this small cult following and we could build these that you're you know bachelor these speak to like you know 37 year old women and up or whatever you know some random yeah I just kinda pitch it as an older demographic I'd say you know I can get you this sort of like 14 to 25 year old dating show audience because they want this other thing and like you know like and basically create a production company that's creating dating shows aimed at my market and try to be the reese reese witherspoon of dating reality tv but I'd be not like doing web 3 crypto and and doing it on my own website I'd be going and shopping it to where there's a whole bunch of buyers and I'm sure they've they've had conversations I know I know that that's not like new to them but like I think that path could work and I would just go all in on that path because I think when you go all in on a path it's very different than just we've thought about that or yeah we've had a couple conversations we've tried it it's very different than yes I've bet the whole thing on making that work and come hell or high water I'm gonna wake up every morning and figure out how do I go get hulu to buy this how do I go get peacock to buy this how do I go get netflix to buy this and what product do I need to create that that's my end customer actually

Sam Parr

So, let me ask you a practical question about how easy this is to pull off. Do you know who Mark Manson is? Mark Manson wrote the book *The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck*. I’ve hung out with him once or twice, and he seemed like a really nice guy. I was just Googling "Mark Manson house," and it said he just sold this Tribeca condo for $15,000,000. Last year, I was reading *The Wall Street Journal* or News Corp, or whatever the company that owns Penguin Publishing is. I was reading their annual report, and they said Mark Manson's book "revolutionized our business." Clearly, this is a $50,000,000,000 company, and they're referring to Mark constantly. I thought, "Wow, that’s amazing." I started researching his book, and it all stemmed from a blog post. He launched a blog called *This is the Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck*, and that was a hit. Then he took it on and made it into a book. Another guy, Naval Ravikant, had AngelList, so he was already successful. It’s not exactly the same thing, but he had a few interesting bits of content out there. Then he had this tweet called "How to Get Rich," which was a long tweet storm, and it kind of was a hit. If he were a little bit hungrier, like Mark was, then he could easily parlay that into something bigger than what it was. You’ve done this before as well. You’ve written maybe three different tweets that got read five or tens of millions of times. I don’t know if you would say it was career-changing, but it was somewhat trajectory-changing. I don’t know how big that trajectory is. Let’s start at the root level of a tweet. With a TV show, movie, or Broadway show being the highest form, if you were given ten shots and had one to two weeks per shot for a tweet, then maybe a blog post, then a podcast, and then a YouTube video, how many of those ten times, if you had a week or so to prepare and research, do you think would become a hit?

Shaan Puri

Well, there are two versions of a hit. A hit can be something that does well, and then there's a hit like the Clubhouse threat or the Metaverse threat, or stuff like that, where it reaches like 20 million people. You know, those were hits. Those were like, I don't know, super hits or grand slams. Which one do you mean? Like those absolute bangers or just something that gets thousands of likes and gets shared?

Sam Parr

maybe it

Shaan Puri

gets read 10,000 times or a 100,000 times on a blog post that gets like a thousand

Sam Parr

Of well, let's just say there's friends in *Seinfeld*, in *The Simpsons*, and then maybe there's like *Family Guy*. And then maybe there's like *The Bachelorette* or *The Bachelor*. And then, like below that, it's like...

Shaan Puri

famous threads yeah

Sam Parr

And then below that, what's another TV show that's like... it's actually a hit, but it's like "The Goldbergs"?

Shaan Puri

below that there's like people busking on the street and below that there's your thread

Sam Parr

No, I mean like, look. Your version of *Family Guy* so far has been one or two things that you've written, but then you've had a bunch of mild hits.

Shaan Puri

So, I think to answer your question, if I tried the way you said, I think 7 out of 10 would do very well. Then, probably one out of every 10 would be... one out of every 20, yeah.

Sam Parr

so it would say 0

Shaan Puri

to 1 probably be like a banger

Sam Parr

yeah yeah okay so that's just like a tweet which is like easy ish to go viral

Shaan Puri

to create

Sam Parr

Now, let's go a step up. A YouTube video... how many YouTube videos, if you had 10 tries, do you think—or let's say 20—could be like a hit?

Shaan Puri

Honestly, I don't know if I'm going to answer your question the way you want because I kind of think for YouTube videos it's a little easier. I don't know why. I think maybe because we hung out with Mr. Beast and I was like, "Oh, okay, I get it. I get what goes into it. I get what a viral concept would be that people would click and that they would share. I get what the hook would be, and I get how to have the big payoff, the big reveal." Also, I haven't done it, so you know, things seem easier when you haven't done it, when you haven't actually gone and tried. But I actually think I could have a higher hit rate with YouTube videos because you get editing. There are a whole bunch of things that go into it compared to a Twitter thread, which is very intellectual. With a YouTube video, you can lean on other things to make it interesting, like the visuals. Just literally the fact that it's a visual medium makes it a lean-back experience versus, "Hey, read these 15 tweets and I hope I've tickled you to the smart part of your brain enough where you give a shit." So, I actually think if I tried on YouTube, I think 7 or 8 out of 10 would hit alright.

Sam Parr

and it would

Shaan Puri

be like in a major way

Sam Parr

**Amp it up!** You have more time. You have **$1,000,000** in funding. You have a little bit of a team. You have to make a hit show once a quarter, or once every six months, or at least once a year at most. What do you think? Could you actually come up with a hit? How hard do you think it would be to create a hit? You have more money, more time, and more resources. You need to have a hit show. It doesn't have to be a "Friends," but it has to be something that makes us happy we gave you money for this, and we’re going to keep buying from you. How many times out of ten do you think you could do that?

Shaan Puri

I think that's lower than the youtube video for me personally because and I'll tell you the reason why because

Sam Parr

that's what we're talking about here

Shaan Puri

Yeah, when you do a show, you're basically betting it all upfront. Then, you find out way later. The feedback loop is extremely slow compared to YouTube. YouTube is like, I can go from concept to production to getting feedback on whether it's good or bad within a week or two. So, I'm going to get a bunch of reps. I can try a bunch of different things, and during that process, I'll find a formula that works. Whereas with the show, it's probably like I get one attempt at it ever in life. It'll take me like a year to produce and another year to distribute. By the time that's all done, whether I was right or wrong, I'm going to be like, "I just hope that I got it right the first time." So, I actually think my hit rate on the show would be way lower. I think it's like, you know, 2 out of 10 or 3 out of 10, something like that.

Sam Parr

that's crazy did I answer

Shaan Puri

the way you thought or no

Sam Parr

Yeah, you did. An interesting exercise—I didn't prepare for this—but an interesting exercise is to think about how many game-changing pieces of content, like Mark's book, we could come up with. We could probably think of a lot of books that started with a really small idea. They thought, "Oh, that's an interesting vein. Let's actually pursue that." That's like an interesting exercise because his book created tens of millions of dollars in value. It basically kind of won on the headline itself. I'm sure the blog post, which I haven't even read, was actually fire and amazing. But I wonder how many amazing bits of content have just started with a small, little rinky-dink idea.

Shaan Puri

Right, I bet a ton. Also, I think for me, at least the way I do things, I'm that way where it's like, "Oh cool, I want to write the book. Let's just tweet out one tweet." Alright, now 5 tweets about that same topic. Alright, now let's tell them to subscribe to a newsletter. Let's just see how much I got, what's resonating. For example, I'll go look at any thread; it's 10 tweets. I'll go see which of these has the most likes. Normally, a thread will just have likes in descending order. The first one will have a lot of likes, the last two will have a lot of likes, and then it'll just fall off from there. But what you'll find is when you have a good joke, or a good one-liner, or a good analogy, that one tweet will get way more likes. So that's a great way to teach yourself how to speak better, how to tweet better, and how to be more compelling when you do stuff. You can do it with other people's threads too. That's what I do. I go look at other people's threads and I'm sort of looking at, "Oh, that's interesting. That one seemed to really resonate; people loved that one-liner." Okay, that's cool. I like how they did that. I can pick that up for my game.

Sam Parr

that's crazy yeah

Shaan Puri

I do have one other number here. So, LeBron's production company made **$45,000,000** in 2020.

Sam Parr

revenue or funding

Shaan Puri

Revenue was $100,000,000 in 2021. They basically do the same thing where they do a bunch of stuff. They have like uninterrupted, which is videos, and like...

Sam Parr

it's good I like it

Shaan Puri

They also have merchandising apparel; it's like a clothing brand. Then they have the HBO series "The Shop." They also made the new "Space Jam" movie. So, his company, SpringHill, basically created a bunch of these projects and sold them to others. If I were these guys, if I'm LeBron and I have so much income coming from other things, I would play a really long game. I think that going and selling "The Shop" to HBO is a smart move. "The Shop" is actually a pretty dope show. It's like this barbershop where they get big actors, NFL players, and basketball players just shooting the breeze in a barbershop setting. It's really high quality and great for entertainment.

Sam Parr

It's kind of like MFM, but with famous people who are more interesting, better, and getting haircuts.

Shaan Puri

Take what you see now. Yeah, trim my beard, first of all. Secondly, we're more athletic, more successful, funnier, you know, like cool. So, basically, that show is awesome, but how many of LeBron's fans are there? LeBron's fans are mostly younger people. If you're an NBA star, your fans range from about 8 years old and up. They don't have HBO. So, if I'm him, why am I not playing the long game, Jeff Bezos style? I would say, "I'm going to drop this dope premium content on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, whatever." I'm going to put the whole thing here. I'm going to blow normal content out of the water because I'm bringing production budgets to this. Actually, I'm going to invest like what Michael Jordan did with his "The Last Dance" documentary. I'm going to invest a lot of money, but I'm not going to put it behind a paywall. Netflix is okay because it's a paywall a lot of people have, but I would just put it on YouTube. I would basically bet that if I grow my brand and my legacy through this content, there's a bigger payoff than what the streaming companies are going to pay me today. I would be willing to invest $20, $30, or even $50 million in order to build a $1 billion+ type of brand payoff at the end. You will just be worshiped and adored even more than you already are. You want to go on one end of the spectrum or the other. You want to say, "I'm getting paid a stupid amount of money, and it doesn't really matter how many people watch this," or "I want everybody to watch this, and I'll pay money to get it there because there's a bigger payoff for me outside of that." You know, like the Logan Paul method, where everything's free, everything's on YouTube, I'm in your face, and then I'll launch my energy drink. I think their energy drink does some ridiculous number.

Sam Parr

doing really well

Shaan Puri

like a $100,000,000 a year or something like that I I don't know the exact number I heard

Sam Parr

About on the pod, they're talking about how they did around $10,000,000 in month one of sales. But I actually think that their drink business—if MrBeast has a $40 chocolate business—I'm curious if some of these low-ticket items can actually become legitimately great companies as opposed to just okay. I think it's hard to sell a $2 drink and make it work really well, so we'll see if they'll make it work.

Shaan Puri

but but dude all these water companies do amazing

Sam Parr

but many don't obviously I mean many don't

Shaan Puri

But if you got the distribution right, like why is Mr. Beast not doing Beast Water? Because he can basically pair it with, you know, like that boxed water thing where it's like, "This is better for the Earth."

Sam Parr

yeah it's true and mister beast

Shaan Puri

Likes that shit where he's just like, "Oh, we're gonna plant a billion trees, and the way we're gonna plant a billion trees is by not using plastic water bottles." Alright, everybody join me. This is Mr. Beast, you know? Aluminum cans, sparkling water... like, go mess up LaCroix! Alright, like, go take these guys down. Mr. Beast could destroy these guys, right? Like, you know, Beast Water... go into the things, go make products that everybody on Earth consumes because you're the mainstream content maker, right? So it's like, dude.

Sam Parr

When he had the chocolate, I was like, "Damn dude, I wanna eat this chocolate." I wanted to show you appreciation for being here and for bringing your item. I thought, "Yeah, sure, I'll eat some of it." But I felt so bad eating it because I don't like eating that type of stuff. I mean, I love it.

Shaan Puri

because I don't eat a chocolate bar on a daily basis

Sam Parr

Well, I... yeah, and I love it. So, my fault for eating it. I was like, "I don't want to eat this," but I want to be respectful and kind because he brought this thing. I was like, "Dude, you need to make something different that I can consume guilt-free." I don't know that many people who just eat chocolate, like a Hershey's chocolate bar, you know what I mean? Correct?

Shaan Puri

In fact, that's a filter I have. If I ever see you just eating a chocolate bar on a Tuesday, I'm going to begin to distance myself. I'm trying to be around a certain type of person that's, say, healthier. Come to think of it, I don't know anybody that does that, actually. You know, funny story: when I joined Monkey Inferno, I was like, "So what was it like for the last product manager?" The guy who was there before me was this guy, Alex, too, who created the $1,000,000 homepage back in the day and now is the founder of Calm, like a multibillion-dollar company. Wait, he was...

Sam Parr

he was the boss of monkey inferno

Shaan Puri

Not the boss. He was like the product manager. So, he was the product manager and he quit to go start Calm. I was like, "Oh, how's Alex? You know I love that guy's work. Like, you know, the $1,000,000 homepage is dope. Calm is interesting, like meditation. Is he just like super zen or what? Is he huge on meditation?" They're like, "You know, that's the funny thing. I think he needs Calm. I wouldn't say he is calm." I was like, "What do you mean?" They're like, "You know, Alex is a fun time dude. He loves to hang out, he loves to go out, he loves to have drinks. You know, he's just like a young dude in his twenties in a big city. He's not like waking up every morning, going to his Japanese garden, and just sitting there for 8 hours, contemplating the thoughts in his mind." So, I was like, "What's the craziest, what's the most degenerate thing? Give me a story. What's the most degenerate thing the founder of Calm was down there?" I remember one time he came in and he was kind of hungover. He just got a bowl, you know, for cereal. His office had a kitchen. He's like, "But instead of cereal, I just went and put a bunch of M&M's in there with a spoon and just ate it."

Sam Parr

I was like I

Shaan Puri

don't know if this story is true or false but it's hilarious and I'm running with it

Sam Parr

that's awesome

Shaan Puri

I remember thinking at that time, "If calm ever becomes a thing, I'm always gonna remember that." You know, like that story? This is like one of these hilarious, small stories.

Hubspot

He's a degen just like us. Our software is the worst. Have you heard of HubSpot? See, most CRMs are a cobbled together mess, but HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous. I think I love our new CRM. Our software is the best. HubSpot: grow better. When we had our office, I remember I was having a bad day. When I have bad days, I like to punish myself by eating poorly. You know, it's like my version of just drinking a 12-pack. It was me and my writer, Connor. We were still in the office at like 8 PM, and I said to Connor, "Today sucked." I looked at him and said, "Bet you I can eat this whole jar of unopened Skippy in 3 bites." And I did. I did, and I felt so horrible for like 3 days. So that was my degen diet moment: just eating an entire jar of Skippy peanut butter in 30 seconds.

Shaan Puri

That's crazy! Alright, let me give you the thing I'm currently obsessed with. So, the thing I'm currently obsessed with—and I brought this up maybe 3 or 4 times—people may be sick of this by now, but I feel like no one is talking about it. I feel like not enough people are freaking out about what's going on with **artificial intelligence** for creating art. So, we've talked about this before. There's **GPT-3**, which is basically AI that will write something for you. You could just give it a prompt, and it'll write the essay. There's **DALL-E**, where you just type in a thing, and it'll generate images as if you searched it on Google. But I now have a bigger picture view of this, which is, you know, like in the early days of the web, the big winner was search engines.

Sam Parr

yeah

Shaan Puri

So, you know, Google obviously started as a search engine. It's like, "Oh, the internet!" Basically, technology has now put a bunch of information out there, so we need a search engine to find the things we want. Now, what's happening is you have a **generative engine**. A generative engine allows you to search for something, and it creates it for you. Right? So, that's just mind-blowing. Instead of searching the internet for something that might be out there, what's the closest thing to what I want? It's like saying, "I am basically the genie from Aladdin, and I can go say, 'Play me a song that mixes kind of like Beethoven and Kanye, but it's about, you know, taking mushrooms.'" And literally, AI will just create a song. And guess what? It doesn't suck! To me, this is so insane. This is so mind-blowing. Every demo I see, I'm just like, I drop immediately what I'm doing. I'm like, "What I'm doing is stupid." Like, "Oh, cool, a podcast." You know, like, "What am I doing? Talking to my mother? Who cares about my mother?" There's AI that can create stuff that you just spit out of your mouth. So, I think I really just want to go down this rabbit hole and figure out what all this is going to be able to do. Now, there's this new thing called **Stable Diffusion**. Have you seen this one? No? Stable Diffusion is the new demo that came out. Unlike DALL-E, they basically didn't paywall it, so anybody can go and use it. You just type in a prompt. So, you're like, "Go to the subreddit Stable Diffusion." Just to see what people create. It's r/stablediffusion. So, just look at the top thing. Right? So, I look at it like, "Let me show you a good one." Okay, go to the one that says **Wendy's**. Do you see it? Scroll down maybe.

Sam Parr

top from when today or it's hot

Shaan Puri

just like normal sorting so hot and then go down 5 and just look at wendy's

Sam Parr

oh yeah oh my god and this is awesome

Shaan Puri

So, how does this work? Basically, you just type in a prompt. The prompt that he gave was, "A beautiful portrait of Wendy's mascot: intricate, elegant, and highly detailed." Then, it just creates this beautiful red-headed girl holding a burger with fries. It looks like incredible art. You just hit the "dream" button. That’s the button, like how the Google button says "search" or "I’m feeling lucky." The one on this says "dream." You hit "dream," and it just morphs it... it’ll morph it... it’ll morph it... it’ll morph it... it’ll morph it... it’ll morph it... it’ll morph it... it’ll just keep making new ones instantaneously. It's like working with a designer. You can say, "Try again, give me something else. No, not that. Okay, make it blue," and it will instantaneously recreate something incredible. It's just mind-blowing what it's creating. Then, you can see these videos. So, go down, just do a Control + F, and write the words "preview of next feature." It's a picture of a duck.

Sam Parr

yeah it's a picture of a duck and it's like a

Shaan Puri

so it looks like a picture of a duck

Sam Parr

it looks like a guy in photoshop or paint making a duck

Shaan Puri

Right, so he's in... I think his Photoshop is the actual tool, but it looks like a Microsoft Paint duck. It's just like a yellow blob with an orange beak and a little duckbill, right? Alright, so it's a 2-minute video. What he's showing is he created a Photoshop plugin using Stable Diffusion that lets you draw anything crappy. Then you just run the plugin and watch it get to the end. So, like, go all the way to the end. By the end, you see this basically fancy-looking duck wearing a monocle and a blue tuxedo shirt. It's like this sophisticated duck.

Sam Parr

dude if I'm a web designer I'm freaking out right now

Shaan Puri

And we thought AI would, you know, automate the shitty jobs. It's like, actually, it's coming for your throat, artists. Like, dude.

Sam Parr

So, I've been looking for this guy's name, and I found him. His name is Lou Yah (L-O-U Y-A-H). I follow him on TikTok, and what he does is, every once in a while, he'll have a post where he, as a producer, will say, "Here's a rap country song that doesn't exist," and then he makes a song. They sound great! He's done this a bunch of times. Martin Shkreli, in one of his blog posts, said, "When I was in prison, I had a lot of time to think. Here are a bunch of predictions that I have for the next 100 years, as well as timelines." One of his predictions is that we're going to land on Mars by 2050 or whatever. Another prediction is that an artificially made song is going to be in the top 10 most played songs in the world and on the Billboard Top 10 within the next 18 months. He put a time limit on it, and I'm on board with that.

Shaan Puri

I 100% believe in that. I don't get why more people aren't freaking out. There are obviously pockets of people who are really interested in this. People see the demo, but it's kind of like we just passed up a purple unicorn while we were driving on a road trip. I was like, "Oh wow, a purple unicorn!" and then we just said, "Okay, you guys wanna stop at Wendy's?" It's like, "Dude, wait! Hold on, there was a purple unicorn next to the road! Pull over! What are we doing?" I think everybody needs to pull over and be like, "What the hell is happening?" This is so insane to me. I just feel like there's going to be a Google-like company that's not a search engine; it's a generation engine, a dream engine. You're going to go there and say what you wish. I think somebody's going to make this for kids. I was like, "Dude, I could make..." you know, I told you before I was interested in creating a Pixar-like company. But it's like, why would I create one movie? What if I created an app that my daughter could just talk to? No text input. She can't type; she just could say, "A duck surfing, you know, with an iPad." She could just say any words, and this thing would create not only an image but it could create an animation. It could create a set of animations; it could create a whole story based on this. She could create her own movie just by saying, "A boy who loves soccer but he's sad because he doesn't get enough chocolate," and it would create a movie based on that. It would create a portrait based on that, and she could create art just with her imagination.

Sam Parr

have you ever

Shaan Puri

to me is wild have you ever

Sam Parr

Heard this theory that your words shape your thoughts. It's not just about positive thinking; it's literally that if a word that describes a particular type of feeling doesn't exist in your language, then it's hard for you to have that feeling. This particular example isn't exactly proven to be true, and a lot of people debate it. But there was a group of Africans who didn't have a perfect word for "square" or a 90-degree angle, and all of their homes were circular. They were like, "circle." For some reason, the idea of "square" and 90 degrees just wasn't part of their language. As a result, a lot of items in their culture were circular. There are also terms in different countries for feelings like, "I'm feeling depressed, but I'm not suicidal." Sometimes, that's a better word than just "depressed." People can say, "Well, you know, I'm just in this mood," and they can explain it a little better. They feel that way. It's almost like explaining to a blind person, "Hey, tell me what red looks like." It's hard; they can't explain it because they don't have it in their vocabulary. With something like this, I wonder if it will unlock a new way of storytelling or a new way of seeing art. It could actually change our mindset in a lot of different ways. If you want to make a movie now, you're influenced by everything that exists. Occasionally, someone comes along and does something totally mind-breaking, something that changes everything. That one person is like a once-in-a-generation type of person, someone really unique, like Steve Jobs. But when you have something that is collectively aggregating all of the data in the world that has ever existed and then coming up with something interesting... do you know what I mean? I wonder what the new stuff that this thing can come out with will be. I literally can't think of it, you know what I mean?

Shaan Puri

Totally. Because what they do is they train it on, like, you know, they basically scrape gigabytes and gigabytes of images from the web. Then there's a big controversy around this. Some people are like, "That's unethical." Those people who put their images up on the web didn't know it was going to be used to train AI that would then put them out of work. That's, you know, not so great. But, by the way, there's a name for this. Some people are trying to do "vegan AI." You know what that is?

Sam Parr

no but that's awesome

Shaan Puri

Vegan AI is basically AI that's trained only on non-copyrighted work. So, it's like work that includes images that were intentionally labeled as royalty-free, available for public use. You can use it however you want. It's sort of like grass-fed... well, what?

Sam Parr

What's like a perfect example of this? The ultimate villain move is GitHub, which is a website where developers post code. It's almost like part practicality; they post code so you can share it, but it's also like a portfolio. What GitHub is doing, which is owned by Microsoft at this point, is basically using AI to scan all the best code of everything that has ever been uploaded. You can kind of... am I explaining this right? They're using AI to write new code based off of all the users who have input data. And the users are like, "Oh cool, so you're taking our portfolio and you're going to use it to put us out of work? That's nice."

Shaan Puri

Right, right. Yeah, and I think Nat Freeman, who I believe was the CEO of GitHub for a time—I don't know if he still is—just tweeted out, "The $10,000,000,000 AI-first product idea hiding in plain sight is GitHub Copilot," which is the name of the thing you mentioned, right? It's the AI assistant that helps you write your code for customer support. You can fine-tune it. Basically, you have this archive of all your thousands and thousands of resolved customer support tickets. Your support rep, who is just a random person sitting in, you know, maybe the Philippines or something like that, becomes dramatically more productive. Your customers get better support, and training becomes easier. He says any company with 20% or more support reps would buy this. So, you know, that guy basically thinks Copilot is like a $1,000,000,000 a year add-on to a $1,000,000,000 or more annual revenue for GitHub because so many software developers opt into it. It makes them more productive. So, it's like, how many other areas is that going to happen in? Dude, when we did...

Sam Parr

When we discussed this, I thought, "This is the type of macro movement that it's like, dude, just quit what you're doing and join in somehow." You know, almost like crypto in '09 or '11 or something like that. It's like, I don't know, man, it's kind of hard to miss if you're just in the ballpark.

Shaan Puri

100%... that's how I feel about this. Like, wait, we drove by a purple unicorn! "Pull over the car! Pull over the car!" In your career, you basically need to go dive in and figure out what this is. If people are already driven in, tell me because I'm trying to dive in. I want to learn as much as I can about this over the next 6 months because I find it fascinating. I'm going to... I can't show this graph, but I'm just going to tell you about a graph real quick. Alright, there is a company... I wonder if I could say the name. I'm going to say the name; maybe we have to bleep this out later. So, there's a company called... have you heard of this?

Sam Parr

yeah I don't exactly know what they do but

Shaan Puri

they're basically like an I think they're just like an ai copywriting solution to their website just do you

Sam Parr

know they're they're bay are they based out of austin I think I met the founder actually

Shaan Puri

So, sounds cute, right? Oh, you know, AI helps you with copyright. Copywriting is this little niche thing that you and I are in. We help people with copywriting too. We both have a copywriting course or product like that. Here's their annual recurring revenue: January of 2021, $2,500,000.

Sam Parr

that that's their annual recurring

Shaan Puri

They... this is their ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) rate that they were at. So, in January 2021, it was $2.5 million. That's pretty good! Like, congrats! Fast forward to April: $5,700,000. Oh wow, you guys doubled in 4 months! Like, really great progress. I'm super impressed. You guys are probably on to something. This could be like a $100,000,000 company or something like that. Fast forward to July: $20,000,000 run rate. Oh wow, what's going on? It's 1 year, and you've gone from $2.5 million to $20,000,000. Fast forward to October: $40,000,000. It's like, what is happening? In 1 year, this went from $2.5 million to $40,000,000 run rate. That is absolute insanity to me! I've never seen an ARR chart like that. Now, I don't know...

Sam Parr

how did you get that

Shaan Puri

Super legit! Someone shared it with me, so I don't know how legit this is, but I don't think it's fake. You know, it's crazy to me. This is like a kind of mind-blowing level of traction.

Sam Parr

goddamn yeah I'm on board with this stuff this is pretty cool

Shaan Puri

that's insane I can't believe how big that is wow

Sam Parr

it seems almost too

Shaan Puri

good to

Sam Parr

be true

Shaan Puri

alright anything else that we wanted to cover

Sam Parr

no that's the pod